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THE GLORY THAT WAS SPAIN 



THE LAND BEYOND 
MEXICO 

BY 
RHYS CARPENTER 




BOSTON 

RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GORHAM PRESS 



/ 



Copyright, 1920, by Richard G. Badger 



All Rights Reserved 






Made in the United States of America 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



©CUG0!i333 



ii 



fr\- 



SOI nOATKEPAES OPET BIBAION MNHMEIA ANEGHKA 
nOINAS fiN EHAGON TINTMENOS SE EHESIN 



This book, thou crafty mule, to thee 
I dedicate in memory, 
For penalty of every wrong 
Avenging me on thee with song. 



FOREWORD 

This book Is the record of a mule-back 
journey of nearly a thousand miles undertaken by 
an American archaeologist who wished to 
familiarize himself with some of the old Maya 
ruins of Central America. 

It aims at giving a picture of the land and 
people of Guatemala, San Salvador, and the 
northern border of Honduras, as they are known 
only to those who are content to sleep in the 
Indian villages and ride the lonely upland trails 
of one of the loveliest and least known countries 
of the New World. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

L In the Highlands 13 

II. Mirage of Quiche 47 

III. Antigua 72 

IV. Riding to Salvador 97 

V. Don Quixote's Ranch .... 124 

VI. The Lowlands 153 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Glory that was Spain Frontispiece 



FACING 
PAGE 



Survivors of Earthquake .... 34 

High Street. Antigua 50 

Road and Ruin. Antigua .... 60 

Feast of the Virgin. Guatemala City 90 

"Idols" of Copan. Honduras . . . 114 

The Thicket. Quirigua 126 



THE LAND BEYOND MEXICO 



THE LAND BEYOND MEXICO 

CHAPTER I 

IN THE HIGHLANDS 

To what lengths do we go for our amusement, 
we, the spoiled children of our age ! I have found 
me a table and made me a bench, and I am seated 
out-of-doors under a sloping roof. All that I 
can see is a courtyard, full of chickens and ducks 
and rain. The hens, devoid of maritime inclina- 
tions, are pecking about forlornly under what 
shelter they can find, while their sea-going cousins, 
indifferent to the flood, drift about happily on the 
lake that was a courtyard. Beyond is a wall 
whose dirty stucco, scaling away, has made patent 
to every passer-by that adobe is mud in spite of all 
pretences. Above it, the more distant ridge of a 
thatched roof vanishes into the grey of the driv- 
ing rain. That is all that meets my eye, except 
an Indian boy or two, moving about the house. 
Most of the Indians are asleep, curled on rugs 
and blankets, though it is not yet three in the 

13 



14 The Land Beyond Mexico 

afternoon. Two others, manifestly against their 
will, subject to the force majeure of the woman 
of the house, have gone to find fodder for my 
mule. Feeding Colorada, I can already see, will 
be the cross and trial of the days to come. But 
what is bad for my temper is good for my 
Spanish: meanwhile it rains. 

I am inclined to think that these haunts are to 
be found in nearly every atlas. The poorest bit 
of cartography will show you that the first country 
south of Mexico is Guatemala, that it stretches 
from ocean to ocean without managing to attain 
any considerable area, and that it has a range of 
mountains running through it, out of Mexico and 
into Salvador, a sacral vertebra in the great 
North American spine. In the undulating table- 
land in the center of those volcanic hills, a 
hundred miles below Mexico, a hundred miles 
above Salvador, there is a little sloping town 
called Patzizia. In one of the topmost streets 
is a house a little larger than its neighbours, with 
a courtyard and a stall. In the stall is a munching 
mule recently renamed Colorada, and in the court- 
yard under a sloping roof is an American traveller 
who is writing and watching the rain. 

A glance indoors at the mattress has just con- 
vinced him that he will not be undressing for bed 
to-night. Meanwhile it rains, and it will still be 



In the Highlands 15 

Indulging in that heavenly and beneficent occupa- 
tion for the five hours of daylight that yet re- 
main. There is neither event nor change. The 
inn-keeper's daughter is rather good-looking, but 
her legs are too thick and her nose is a trifle 
short; out in the dreary deluge, unfed and un- 
pltied, there is tied a decrepit old horse with a sore 
on either shoulder; the household wash is flying 
in the wind in a preposterous attempt to dry itself, 
though Deukalion and Gilgamesh never beheld 
anything more torrential; an attractive, but sod- 
den, little pig has just taken refuge in my bed- 
room, and I am debating whether it is Christian 
to turn him out into the wet. . . . Oh, we 
spoiled children of our age 1 I have come three 
thousand miles for this; and I half believe that I 
enjoy it. 

The head of the household Is an old, old woman 
(aetate sua XLV) who does all her arithmetic 
with kernels of dried corn. There is, it seems, 
something unprognosticable in the addition of six 
and five which only empiric observation can de- 
termine. But It Is folly to deride her methods, 
for I suspect her to be the richest woman In the 
village and, to judge by the wrinkled cunning of 
her eyes, the shrewdest. There are three genera- 
tions under her roof, and unless her strong-ankled 
grand-daughter is as haughty as she is pretty, 



1 6 The Land Beyond Mexico 

future travellers will find four. She was atten- 
tive to my wants and comfort, at which I should 
have been surprised had I known the country bet- 
ter. I was soon to learn that Guatemala is ob- 
livious to the stranger within her gates, that she 
greets him with indifference, tends him with in- 
dolence, and speeds him in indigence. I do not 
mean that he is robbed or cheated on his de- 
parture. On the contrary, he cannot get rid of 
his money, since it buys him nothing. The people 
are not hostile, but inactive; incurious, rather than 
unfriendly; and negligent because they are unim- 
aginative and because they work only when they 
must. Travelling is cheap and uncomfortable. 
Distances are long and food is meagre. But I 
was well-fed that afternoon in Patzizia and went 
to bed at an early hour. The pig had upheld his 
right of entry; but soon my sleepy senses heard 
neither him nor the rain, and when I woke at 
dawn, both had vanished. 

I set out early on my northward road, where 
among pines and corn-fields and green slopes of 
grass I almost found again our own Atlantic 
states. Some glimpse, some turn, some folding of 
the hills had an easy and pleasant familiarity, only 
to lose its homely appeal a hundred yards further 
up the roadj where agave and a burst of un- 



In the Highlands 17 

northern flowers marked the invasion of the low- 
land flora from the hot and luxuriant coast be- 
yond the mountain-wall. 

The road from Patzizia leads between green 
hedges through a garden-land where the corn 
grows high and weeds are unbelievably fertile. 
Less than fifteen degrees north of the Equator 
and more than six thousand feet above the sea, 
this upland of volcanic soil is a compromise be- 
tween a tropic latitude and a temperate altitude. 
There is a northern character to the scenery, yet 
the greens are harder and cruder, and the light 
has none of the richness and shadow-play of 
Berkshire lawns or New Hampshire woods. In 
some strange way it is the Tropics still. 

Behind me as I rode were the hills, high wood- 
ed slopes with a towering red peak of rock above 
them, the head of Fire, the great volcano. Before 
me across the growing plain were other hills less 
high, but running up into blue forest-ridges that 
made me impatient of my level road between the 
hedges. 

The Indians passed me in an endless proces- 
sion of servitude. They were carrying earthen 
jugs and pots, and managed to string twenty ves- 
sels upon a single frame. Bowed under the load 
which was piled high above their heads, they 
trotted along, barefooted or sandalled, with the 



1 8 The Land Beyond Mexico 

strange half-running gait which is their character- 
istic mode of journey. They are no better than 
beasts of burden. Cheaper than mules, they take 
the four-foot's place and carry these wares to 
markets that are two and three days distant. 
Short of stature, they are tremendously develop- 
ed in the muscles of their legs and backs, but 
feeble in their arms, and permanently bent from 
their unenviable occupation. 

The pottery itself is crudely made. Shaped on 
a wheel, it is symmetrical enough, but without any 
grace or character. The flame-marks show on 
every piece, patches of black where the clay has 
been unevenly baked. Strung on wooden frames, 
these pots came down the road with a pair of 
bare brown legs beneath them, a strange sight for 
the unaccustomed. But I rode into a spectacle 
much worse; for as I descended to a little stream 
I had the horrid experience of meeting a rigid 
human-being, wrapped like a mummy in pink cloth 
and carried in a wooden frame on an Indian's 
back. Not until I saw that the protruding naked 
feet were of wax did I realize that I had stumbled 
neither on crime nor on funeral ceremony, but that 
some church was to be enriched with the embodi- 
ment of a saint. 

We breakfasted at ten in the village of Patzum, 



In the Highlands 19 

Colorada on a couple of pounds of dried corn, 
myself on fried eggs and frijoles, tortillas, and 
coffee. Tortillas and frijoles will be common 
words of mine throughout this book. Both are 
well enough In moderation, but to these two in 
Guatemala there Is no end. Frijoles are black 
beans, always boiled and sometimes mashed and 
re-warmed; tortillas are both a food and a cere- 
mony. Dried Indian corn Is rubbed on stone to 
a whitish flour, mixed with water to a dough, 
moulded and patted to a pancake, baked on an 
open griddle to an uneven brown, and fed to 
friend and foe. Fresh and hot they are very 
good; and when cold they can be restored to the 
category of food by toasting. In the Maya 
world frijoles are meat and tortillas are bread. 
Besides these there Is water In the country; but 
the favourite drink Is the colourless brandy which 
Is distilled from crude cane-sugar. If It were 
deodorized It might sell for pure alcohol. Of 
this powerful Intoxicant there Is an unlimited 
supply and an unmoderated consumption. Hav- 
ing no prejudice against Bacchus, I cannot be con- 
sidered partisan If I call this the scourge of the 
Indian race In whose degeneration and gradual 
extinction it is one of three prime factors. The 
other two are the changed habits of life and the 



20 The Land Beyond Mexico 

diseases brought by the white man. "We died 
of the blessings of civilisation," will be written 
on the gravestone of the race. 

But I had no such thoughts as I rode away 
from Patzum. A level road, a green landscape, 
a sunny blue sky after a day of rain, a willing 
mule, and an indolent rider, — for once it was the 
time and the place and the loved things all to- 
gether. The Indians trotted by without a look 
or a word of greeting, although when I insisted 
on the amenities usual to fellow-beings, they seem- 
ed much pleased at the distinction between Mayas 
and mules which my "Good-afternoon" implied. 

An hour passed without incident. Twice the 
path skirted curious earth ravines whose edges 
dropped away sheer for a good two hundred feet. 
The flat fertile table-land stretched to the very 
brink without a warning wrinkle or shudder; be- 
yond the chasm, it resumed its level expanse. I 
tied Colorada to a bush and peered over an un- 
safe edge. Far below were the tops of trees 
and the crowded green of well-watered and well- 
shadowed growth; but there was neither stream 
nor outlet to be seen. The ravine yawned like 
a crevasse in a field of ice without further geo- 
logic excuse. 

I rode on and was beginning to think Guate- 
malan journeying dull and disappointing, when 



In the Highlands 21 

the path suddenly fell into one of these abysses. 
In the course of a thousand feet of steep descent 
on washed-out rocky zig-zags, table-land and 
corn-field disappeared, orchid-covered moss-hung 
oaks massed to a forest, and cliffs and wooded 
ridges shut out half the sky. The only apparent 
master and maker of all this scenery was a diminu- 
tive stream that twinkled merrily along on the 
floor of the ravine. It was like a kitten playing 
among the overturned tables and broken china of 
a feast, and it seemed absurd to blame all that 
havoc upon so small a thing. 

Once down at the bottom, the path splashed 
about in the httle stream till it came to a green 
and lonely farm and there it passed abruptly 
through a door of rock whose traces of ancient 
barricading hinted of less peaceful times. 
Through wrinkled woods higher and higher above 
the stream the trail bent in and out as it fol- 
lowed the creases of the valley-side; but just as 
one hoped to reach the rim of the table-land 
above, it dropped again deeper than ever to a 
foaming ford. Guatemalan trails are fond of 
such tricks. They lure the traveller within sight 
of his goal only to drop him into interminable 
clefts and sink him into hidden woods to "wail 
by impassable streams." Yet the solitude and the 
endless trees, the glimpses of water and distant 



22 The Land Beyond Mexico 

heights, the unknown path and the unexpected 
scenes, make up for these uneven pilgrimages. 

The Pass of the Langadha, the finest similar 
thing in Greece, is beggared by the densely over- 
grown gorges through which I rode that day. 
There is no Sparta at the end to make the 
passage famous ; yet I came upon something whose 
beauty can rival the fragrant orange-blossomed 
plain of the Eurotas below snow-capped Tay- 
getos. At five in the afternoon, after riding for 
an hour high up in mountain fog and shower, I 
came down through a village and out upon the 
steepest descent of the day. Crawling down step 
by step on ragged zig-zags in the midst of a down- 
pour of rain that made a river under Colorada's 
hoofs and a grey curtain of the air, I had ceased 
to expect or hope, thinking it was enough to be 
still on Colorada's back, when in the midst of my 
wretchedness the rain stopped with characteris- 
tic abruptness, the wind blew holes in the mist, 
and I saw sheer under me, seemingly thousands 
of feet, a lowland lake with further shores of 
cliff. It was fog-magic; for I felt as though I 
were hung in the clouds, and the plain was so 
bright and so fresh and so clear and the lake 
was of such a summer-blue that it seemed a vision 
out of another world and the most beautiful sight 
that I had ever seen. 



In the Highlands 23 

Actually it was only a few more hundred feet 
down to the plain. With the last step, upland 
changed to lowland and the path slipped into a 
riot of bamboo, sugar-cane, oranges, limes, and 
plants whose names are only native words to 
me. But Jordan had broken into Eden: for the 
path led demurely into a river whose rain- 
swollen rapid I could not cross, even though I 
knew that dinner and bed dwelt beyond the other 
bank. The downpour began again. With four- 
teen hundred feet of rock behind me and an un- 
fordable river ahead, a sodden soil beneath me 
and a falling sky above, I was well encompassed. 
But an Indian appearing after a little told me 
of an easier ford and showed me a little jungle- 
track which I had mistaken for an irrigation- 
ditch in action. Arrived at the passage, Colo- 
rada chose wisely between the two evils of a spur- 
ring master and a foaming stream and we were 
soon in Panajachel in one of the few Guatemalan 
inns where strangers seem to be really welcome. 

After dinner I sat out in the grass-grown court 
of the inn. The rain had passed, and the day's 
strangeness was already a memory. In the twi- 
hght a tree-toad was piping his high-pitched eve- 
ning song; the fire-flies were lighting their 
lamps; on the horizon a thunderstorm was ris- 



24 The Land Beyond Mexico 

ing, and the distant lightning flared without sound. 
The air was warm and almost still. It was a 
northern evening of mid-summer, and I felt that 
I was back in the New England hills. Yet I knew 
that on the other side of the wall the Indians 
were encamped in a Guatemalan village-square, 
crouching over tiny bonfires at which they were 
toasting tortillas and brewing coffee, or seated in 
the shelter of the raised wooden arcade in silent 
contemplation of their fellows. And beyond the 
square were the slow-falling ruins of a church 
built by the vanished Spaniards, and beyond in 
a crumbled belfry hung bells that were cast long 
ago in Spain. For all the illusion I was in an 
Indian village, hemmed in by a language that was 
not my own; and when the clouds blew from the 
sky it was not the New England constellations 
that shone out. 

To everyone who has emerged from the sub- 
savage condition of treating the stars as sprin- 
klings from some vast salt-shaker, unordered 
and unarrangeable as the sugar-grains we strew 
on cakes, a voyage into the Tropics holds a new 
experience. Some of us read the Odyssey and, 
regarding the simple allusions to the stars as lit- 
erary exotics, miss the true savour of that homely 
narrative. Others, however, have raised them- 
selves sufficiently near to the status of the early 



In the Highlands 25 

races to find something of comradeship in the 
map of heaven. In Europe and in the Far East 
they look for the old time-endeared constella- 
tions and, seeing them, find something familiar 
and something of home. But when they travel 
south across the line of the tropics, there come, 
night after night, unknown stars higher and 
higher above the horizon into which they steer. 
The eternity of space with its everlasting stretches 
we explain to children for their wonder, without 
feeling what we speak. To us these are unpalat- 
able common-places. But when the familiar con- 
stellations make room for others unknown, there 
blows over us of a sudden a breath from that 
other half of the unbounded into which we have 
never gazed. 

In much the same way those who have known 
the Atlantic all their lives stare like Cortes 
strangely and with an unexplained exaltation on 
the Pacific surf when first it breaks before them. 
But the southern skies are an ocean incompara- 
bly vaster and richer. I fear that I have little 
of ready-made religion; but no pilgrim ever sa- 
luted a relic of Golgotha with truer emotion than 
I the Southern Cross and the shining stars whom 

I had never seen. 
******* 

Next morning I went swimming in the lake, to 



2 6 TJir Land Beyond Mexico 

the amazement and idolatrous admiration of the 
nativ*e boys who had never seen the simple strokes 
which I executed so ineffectively. These Indians 
of Guatemala are poor swimmers, poor horsemen, 
poor judges of distance and direction, poor cooks, 
and poor hunters. They ^ire excellent beasts of 
burden and splendid fanatics; but the marvellous 
woodcraft and primitive proficiency with which 
savage races are so popularly endowed should be 
sought elsewhere than in Guatemala. 

As I came ashore I discovered that the "drift- 
wooci" of the sandy beach was a line of pumice 
and I forthwith indulged a small-boy's idea of 
pleasure by throwing into the water the largest 
stones that I could lind. They recovered smil- 
ingly from the splash, to bob about as serenely 
as though there were nothing unusual in their be- 
haviour. 

I was not surprised to learn that the lake of 
Atitlan had no bottom, for the burden of proof 
can be put on the unbeliever; but I was not pre- 
pared to hear that it had no outlet. For that Is 
a matter which any pair of eyes might settle to 
the contrary. And this I determined to do. 

A white-haired, round-faced German sea-cap- 
tain navigates a launch with wheel and compass 
across the ten-mile deep. Perhaps there are fogg}" 



In the Highlands 27 

days to justify this wilful reminiscence of a sea- 
going life, or it may be that the ritual instils ad- 
ditional respect into the humble native mind. 

At the long-drawn blast of a cheap brass horn 
the waiting Indians solemnly gathered their packs 
and trooped aboard with a couple of ragged and 
dirty bills for the waiting captain, whose aged 
face while he gathered the five-cent fares glowed 
with a benevolence hitherto confined to the an- 
gelic host. 

The water was windless, in colour more green 
than blue. Cliffs and mountain-slopes shut it in, 
making their ring more marked by their clear re- 
flections. On the furthest shore stood two vol- 
canoes with their heads in cloud. The world 
seemed silent and sun-flooded. Nature has her 
own calendar and this was her Sabbath of rest. 
It is a day which the human calendar in Central 
America intercalates with an almost diurnal as- 
siduity, but which is only impressive when wind 
and water proclaim it. 

The Indians crouched on the deck, without 
comment or question among themselves, while the 
launch puffed over the quiet surface and the cliffs 
rose higher behind us as the distance increased. 
Only an Axenstrasse could girdle Atitlan. Even 
the shaggiest paths have to turn inland, so that 



28 The Land Beyond Mexico 

it becomes a long and difficult day's ride to reach 
the villages to which the launch crosses in a couple 
of hours. 

There was in truth no outlet to the lake. 
Where it might have been, the volcanoes have 
pushed up their barriers. Between the cones of 
Toliman and San Pedro the water has run in, 
but a lava wall shuts off further progress. Thus 
a deep bay is formed, on whose steep shore stands 
Atitlan, the village from which the lake has its 
name. It is one of the oldest Guatemalan towns 
and is mentioned in the Spanish chronicles as the 
home of the Tzutohiles, a tribe whose name has 
nowadays more flavour than significance. 

Going ashore, I found myself back in my boy- 
hood Africa of du Chaillu. There was nothing 
to suggest Spain or Spaniard. People and life 
were savage. The houses were built with walls 
of split bamboo, pervious to smoke from within 
and eyesight from without. The pointed roofs 
of palm-leaf ended in a central earthen pot that 
covered the radiating thatch. I was looking on 
the prototype of the Greek round temple and I 
had before me the origin of the elaborate central 
poppy-flower which crowned the marble Olym- 
pian tholos of Philip of Macedon. My thoughts, 
in fact, were rather far afield; for an "African" 
village is amazingly dull. But my speculations 



In the Highlands 29 

came out of the Hellenic past and leaped from 
the chill of architecture to the human warmth of 
sculpture when the bare-legged Indian girls came 
down the rocky street to fill their water-pitchers. 
With one hand raised to the empty vessel on their 
head they descended with a pack-mule's sure- 
footedness and more than a pack-mule's grace. 
It was after they had waded into the lake, filled 
the jug, replaced it on their heads, and begun 
to reascend with both arms raised to steady the 
heavy burden, that I reahzed that eurhythmies 
were folly and that our daughters should be 
taught to carry water-jugs. And as they wore so 
little clothing with such obvious propriety, — but 
that ruins my scheme for our northern daughters. 

There are other villages on the shores of Atit- 
lan, slightly differing in size and appearance, but 
alike in their monotony. It is not the little towns 
which are interesting in Guatemala, but the open 
country. And among all the scenery through 
which I was to ride there was to be nothing more 
beautiful than this. 

In clear weather Atitlan is a blue mountain- 
lake shut in by green heights and dark walls where 
waterfalls hang like white ribbons. The fine clear 
forms of the great volcanoes break the line of 
girdling hills and add their smooth green slopes 
to the scene's tranquillity. There are no vine- 



30 The Land Beyond Mexico 

yards nor gardens to suggest North Italy, but an 
incomparable fertility and a far-away inland 
charm of sunlit isolation. 

In time of storm all this is changed. When 
the lightning pours over it and the rain-gusts 
sweep across it Atitlan has a sudden grim and 
terrifying appearance. The circle of rock dark- 
ens and closes in, the clouds come down like a 
cover to a kettle, and in the vast crater, lifted 
a mile in air above the Pacific level, the storm 
stirs wind and wave to a black witches'-brew in 
an uproar of water and air and fire. After it 
all, when the rain has passed and the wind has 
dropped, the green slopes suddenly reappear 
fresher and brighter and above the wild dark 
walls with their curled cornice of clouds shines 
the childishly innocent blue of Fra Angelico's 
paradise. 

It is a region of moods and changing moments 
whose variety seems inexhaustible. Outstaying 
my intentions, exploring its woods and valleys 
and towns and climbing some of its heights, I 
found it ever more beautiful. When at last I 
came to leave it I was already convinced that 
I should find nothing finer in Central America. 
Though I knew that it could not be true, I had 
come to sympathize with the kindly old man of the 
inn who had said so simply and so quietly, 



In the Highlands • 31 

"Atitlan, you know, is the most beautiful spot in 
the world." 

I left Panajachel early in the morning. In a 
season where daily rain ruins the afternoon my 
habits were growing more and more matutinal. 
In the end I was to reach the native stage of 
ultimate attainment and saddle Colorada by can- 
dle-light ten minutes before the first dawn. But 
Panajachel came early in my travels, before a 
receding breakfast had reached those sunless 
hours, and it was seven o'clock before I was well 
upon my road. 

The path climbed the steep mountain-side, lead- 
ing at times along rocky shelves, at times by hewn 
steps of stone and once through the spray of a 
waterfall, while the lake sank slowly below me, 
growing bluer and brighter as it receded. New 
heights rose behind the familiar hills and far on 
the south-eastern horizon I saw a peaked hat of 
rock which I recognized to be Fire, the towering 
friend of my previous ride. At the top of the 
wall the path turned inland and I soon reached 
the large and uninteresting village of Solola. 

It is not my intention to make a diary of such 
uneventful progress. Just as it is art's privilege 
not to paint everything in a landscape, so I In- 
tend to change the perspective which the ticking 



32 The Land Beyond Mexico 

clock of the present imposed upon me as I rode 
hour after hour and day after day, and to set 
the past in a temporal setting where many an 
hour in the saddle may drop from sight and in- 
tervening distances (if they were but dull 
stretches) may cease to divide. 

On this day, therefore, I find myself passing 
through pine woods full of noisy flocks of the 
bluest of jays and straightway thereafter begging 
black-beans and tortillas in a thatched and smoky 
Indian hut, as though one had but to emerge 
from that bird-haunted thicket to encounter the 
dirty little village which so grudgingly prepared 
me so poor a midday meal. And hardly is the 
meal over when I am on a great hill-side, mount- 
ing amid orchid-covered oaks through cool, deep 
shadows, only to be caught in a torrential thunder- 
storm from which even those great trees cannot 
shelter me. The path turns into a flight of care- 
fully paved steps, and the steps into a brown 
torrent where Colorada and I stumble up, with 
occasional backward glimpses at the uplands 
which we have left so far below us, till we emerge 
on a sodden Alpine meadow ten thousand feet 
above the sea. And here the sun comes out, the 
lush green shines, and song-sparrows try again 
their northern song. There are flowers, shep- 
herds with their sheep, and over us all a bright 



In the Highlands' 33 

sky and a cool wind. It is that rare thing, — ^^an 
idyll that is not just between the covers of a 
book but out in the world of real things where 
there is none of the falseness of fine writing. 
Being of that unenduring kingdom, it soon is 
over. In its place come muddy paths, hard to 
find and slippery to follow, marshalling a seem- 
ingly unlimited array of yet-remaining miles. But 
if one is fairly inured to the saddle and fond 
of the uplands, no more beautiful ride could be 
imagined. 

I must have loitered on my way, for it was 
nearly dusk before I came to the edge of the up- 
lands. The twinkling lights were beginning to 
come out in the little checker-board of a town 
below me and before Colorada had swung her 
leisurely nose around the last zig-zag of the de- 
scent it was dark. Luckily there were hedges 
and soon there were houses to shut us in upon 
our stumbling path, and though once I thought 
I had found a sheer descent to Cocytus we came 
to the lights at last. They were electric and 
illumined street-corners whose signs announced 
numbered avenues and streets. Colorada as- 
sumed a metropolitan air of indifferent gentility 
whose leisure I ended rudely with my spurs. We 
clattered down the streets into the deserted 
market-place, gathered Information from the sen- 



34 The Land Beyond Mexico 

try of the garrison, and ended our long day's ride 
in the Central Hotel, Totonicapan, Los Altos, 
Guatemala (C. A.). Colorada's stall was oppo- 
site mine, though an intervening couple of long- 
horned sheep, a sore-backed mare with her ragged 
rumply-coated filly, and an Indian stable-boy 
made communication difficult. 

I dined poorly and slept well. When I woke 
it was early morning, grey with rain. My itin- 
erary for the day was thus already settled, — to 
Colorada's complete satisfaction. At ten o'clock 
It cleared suddenly and I went a-foot to see the 
town, though I knew beforehand what I should 
find: — a cabildo, a garrison, and a line of gen- 
eral shops around an open paved square; a 
church, with dark, empty floor of red tile, wax 
images dressed in gaudy calicoes, altarpleces over- 
loaded with gilding, and Indian women reciting 
endless petitions in their own weird tongue; be- 
yond that, only an occasional open shop-front and 
the blank one-storied line of homes. To pass 
a sunny hour in the streets of Totonicapan one 
has need of the Old Dutch Masters' eyes, ap- 
preciative of homely squalor and the picturesque- 
ness of petty things; but to pass a rainy afternoon 
in the same town one needs the devil's own in- 
dulgence for eternity. I returned to my quar- 
ters, lunched, and soon afterwards began my 




SURVIVORS OF EARTHQUAKE 



In the Highlands 35 

inevitable traveler's refrain of "Quid nunc?" 
After I had made a veterinary round of insincere 
affection which included two starved dogs (who 
were interested in everything) , the mare and her 
filly (who were interested only in each other), the 
sheep (who were chiefly interested in salt), and 
three alien mules (who were interested in noth- 
ing at all), — after all this I looked at my watch 
and saw that it was half past two. I studied 
my map for an hour or more — and found that it 
was twenty minutes to three. Then I sat around 
for a long time and finally crossed the street 
to play on the billiard-table (for every Guate- 
malan town must have billiard-tables, sky-rockets, 
sewing machines, and a Temple of Minerva: 
nothing else matters). But the famous Mikado 
had been there before me and attained his in- 
famous Object All-sublime. And now it was 
nearly three o'clock. A tame deer entered the 
room and had late luncheon on the floor and a 
large parrot, seeing me bored, obliged with an 
impersonation of a derelict Indian baby in acute 
whooping-cough. I flatter myself that I suc- 
ceeded in openly wounding his histrionic pride by 
leaving the room at once. 

It was now still nearly three o'clock. I found 
a bleary German who was taking "The Baths." 
He took them very early in the morning as he 



36 The Land Beyond Mexico 

preferred to precede native patronage. He ob- 
jected to the Indian women more than to the 
men and had an almost profane aversion to the 
ultra-modern practise of what I might scientifi- 
cally describe as syncolymbesis of the sexes. But 
my new friend soon left me to attend to some 
sausages {sic!) in a critical stage of manufac- 
ture, and after a Httle the clock at last managed 
to strike three. It was raining hard — and din- 
ner was at six. In the distance, the parrot had 
taken to such fits of idiotic laughter that I de- 
termined to have him shot at sun-rise. Such are 
the diversions and excitements of a Central Amer- 
ican village. 

We are snobs with our affectations of culture, 
our sets and our fads and our civilized banali- 
ties. Instead of taking delight in our music and 
our art for what they are, we ruin our enjoy- 
ment with sophisticated prejudices and discrimi- 
nations. How differently we should feel if only 
we could be brought to realize that cultural civili- 
sation is the inestimable sun that lights the hor- 
rible darkness of sentient life ! I myself shall 
relapse into snobbery and discriminations. But 
for a little while, in Totonicapan, eight thousand 
feet in the hills, with never a book or a friend 
or a game or a theatre or a concert or a beauti- 
ful object, in rain and utter loneliness, I almost 



In the Highlands 37 

understood the worth of our European heirloom 
of 4000 years. 

What a difference rain can make! The dis- 
similarities of a Yorkshireman and a Neapolitan 
are largely a matter of rain. The Arab is an Arab 
because of the desert and the desert is a desert 
because of the rain. My Guatemalan life was a 
quilt-work of contrasting emotions, all traceable 
to that single cause. The Eternal within us is in 
league with the Temporal and the spirit's glass 
is only too often indistinguishable from the ba- 
rometer. My mental weather-chart for almost 
any of those days of mule-back journeying might 
have run as follows: 

As I rode up out of the valley in the morning 
and the bugles blew in the little town at Colo- 
rada's feet, the discomforts of the night were 
forgotten. The bugles were out of tune, but the 
sense of their discordance penetrated no further 
than the brain. The mist rose from the plain 
and the sunhght was clear and sharp on the hills. 
Day-Hght and morning air and an unknown path, 
they were like the singing of birds in one's heart 
and the blowing of fresh winds across the spirit. 
Ten hours later it was a different world. The 
rain poured down and the mountain-fog shut 
out every view. The steep paths were water- 
torrents, — endless brown fordings amid the 



38 The Land Beyond Mexico 

stones, slippery mud-slides elsewhere. There 
was no shelter, since the day's appointed goal 
must be made before dusk. The steady rain, the 
plodding pace became part of the mind. The 
spirit's eye grew as cloudy as the rain-hung corn- 
fields, motionless and impenetrable as the great 
dripping woods. But it all ended, with food and 
warmth and a bed at last. And the next morn- 
ing under a blue sky I was oft through the early 
light again and as I rode up out of the valley 
the bugles blew in some other little town at Colo- 
rada's feet. 

Here more than elsewhere, life was a contrast 
of wet and dry. But I suspect that elsewhere, 
too, though it be less obvious than in Totoni- 
capan, the weather is in the end responsible for 
most of our human behaviour. 

And these intolerable reflections, likewise, were 
after all due only to the rain; and when it ceased 
within an hour I forgot my gloominess and went 
for another walk. 

Guatemala is a land where the small boy's 
prerogative of jeering and reviling the stranger 
for his strangeness' sake Is under abeyance or un- 
known. Everywhere my costume aroused indig- 
nation In the dogs; but the Indians refrained even 
from that wordless comment which a stare con- 



In the Highlands 39 

veys. That afternoon beyond Totonicapan, 
walking, though I obviously belonged on mule- 
back, only the four-foot mongrel remarked upon 
my condition; until, while trying to propitiate one 
of my yelping critics, I fell victim to suspicion. 

Never have I seen such pitiful dogs as in Cen- 
tral America. Canine anatomy may here be 
studied without dissection. Graveyard carcasses 
slink on forlorn for agings. Even the frijoles and 
tortillas seem denied to them. The affection of 
their masters neither includes food nor excludes 
missiles. The poor animals are little better than 
starveling outcasts sneaking hfelong to the grave. 
And even the grave is precarious, or rather its 
absence only too assured. The cowled directors 
of their funerals, the buzzards, stare down at 
them from the thatched ridge of their own mas- 
ter's roof as though they begrudged them even 
those few days of living wretchedness. 

So I was surprised at the suspicion into which 
I fell through being discovered in my overtures 
to a nasty little dog; for the beast had been born 
with his tail between his legs and a yelp in his 
throat. 

Further on I assisted a young fowl who seemed 
unreasonably upset at the very natural discovery 
that she could not ascend a perfectly sheer em- 
bankment. During our efforts there appeared an 



40 The Land Beyond Mexico 

Indian boy. Only my distinguished leggings saved 
my reputation. 

The indulgent reader will see that I am not 
wasting his patience upon anecdotes of the poul- 
try-yard, but laying bare a deep racial difference. 

For example, I hold it self-evident that every- 
one should be interested in young pigs, — little 
trotters and friskers I mean, delightful snouty 
little fellows with bright eyes. But I found 
that when I met them twinkling to market my elo- 
quent interest was always viewed by the Indians 
with the uneasiness with which we regard the in- 
comprehensible and fantastic. Yet a team of 
seven in harness trotting up a steep mountain- 
path is as much a sight as is a coach-and-four, 
especially if one considers that the slightest ac- 
cident may convert the driver into a badly wound 
May-pole. 

Everywhere my advances to animals were con- 
sistently misunderstood, even by the victims of 
my affection. Colorada alone came to compre- 
hend that a raised hand can fall lightly. 

That evening when I entered for dinner I found 
three men already at table, — an abiding and in- 
separable trinity whose outward number I in- 
creased to four without in any way disturbing 
those properties peculiar to the triangle. 



In the Highlands 41 

Of that mutually devoted crew the third never 
left any impression on me. From meal to meal 
I forgot him. He was one of those, no doubt, 
who keep the world's work done, reliable and 
unobtrusive, dull as the cog-wheel whose func- 
tion in society he performed. I am ready to al- 
low that he may have been the best man of the 
three; but as he made no impression I am obliged 
to leave him out. Of the other two there is more 
to say. 

One was the German sausage-maker, my ac- 
quaintance of the early afternoon. Profanity was 
to his conversation what spices must have been to 
his sausages: a plentiful inspersion suited the cli- 
mate. His past was a veritable sausage-meat of 
strange happenings. He was a man stuffed and 
seasoned with experience. But this I learned 
later, for at the time I had eyes only for the 
remaining spirit of that trinity. 

He was an Indian and a barber. Small-headed, 
with dirty black curls standing out in nodding 
animation, he had the tiny alert eyes of a prowl- 
ing night-animal. He used his forefinger in con- 
versation and would cock his head and regard it 
with the bright excitement of a crafty child. He 
was forever saying witty things which to me as 
invariably seemed without point. By a display 
of interest and some faded photographs he tried 



42 The Land Beyond Mexico 

to lure me into submission to his black craft; 
but I wanted none of his barbarous rites, and 
I fear that a slight coldness sprang up between 
us. While the sausage-maker and I talked 
rheumatism and German submarines, he would 
watch us in moody silence like an Olympian 
estranged, an unsuspected shepherd of Admetus. 
Then suddenly he would blow off all his ill-hu- 
mour in a sparkling geyser-jet of discourse, be- 
showering the little Indian waiter who at the end 
of an attentive listening would emit an "Ah, si!" 
which showed only too clearly that he had made 
nothing of Figaro or of Spanish. 

The sausage-maker was a different character. 
His shirt seemed always on the verge of dis- 
missal to the tub, yet never so soiled itself as 
to bring about that painful separation. His sus- 
penders dispensed with buttons by a seamanlike 
use of marlin at crucial junctions. Coat and hat 
were to him unessential, though Totonicapan is 
anything but tropical. His sharp face was wrin- 
kled, worn more by that capricious weather which 
we call adversity than by the far less trying me- 
teorological changes of wind and rain and sun. 
He had no respect for god or devil, much less for 
human-kind. But as this attitude arose from 
knowledge and not from braggardism, he was 
endurable enough (considering the latitude). In 



In the Highlands 43 

fact he was socialist rather than anarchist, and 
seasoned enough to have discovered that the mil- 
lennium would not occur during his life-time. 

A fortnight later when I was again in Totoni- 
capan he told me his story. And as I have no 
table-talk from that first dinner with the trinity, 
I may be allowed to enliven its rice and black- 
beans, faded meat, tortillas, stewed papaya, and 
coffee, by relating here as I later heard it 

The Sausage-maker^ s Romance 

He began mortal miseries as a Hanoverian 
peasant-baby and gained a German strength of 
foot and tongue on a tiny farm. But of those 
bucolic years he had little to say and my first 
good glimpse of him was in the heart of Africa 
with the great Stanley. For more than a year 
he was member of the party: quorum si pars 
maffua fuit one may perhaps determine by read- 
ing the memoirs of that strong-handed adven- 
turer. When a Belgian caravan at length en- 
countered them the smell of the coast was strong 
in the Hanoverian's nostrils. Without overmuch 
ceremony he said his farewells to Stanley and 
went with the Belgians down to the ships. From 
Stanley, he declared, he had learned his English, 
— ^the humour of which remark the great explorer 
would have been the first to admit. Perhaps 



44 The Land Beyond Mexico 

some of the fabric was laid In the jungle, but the 
embroidery seems to have been added later when 
he cruised the seven seas with the baccalaureate 
distinction of the fo'c'sle. 

His exodus from the jungle could not have 
been entirely surreptitious. For later, in Aus- 
tralia, he encountered Stanley again, and Stanley, 
the great Stanley, clapped him on the back before 
all the crowd and acknowledged him for com- 
rade. The exact words of that unforgettable 
greeting were sensible and sufficient: "By God, 
here's Weissmann!" said Stanley; and the tears 
came to the German's eyes as he told the inci- 
dent. 

Whaling and carrying cargo in sailing vessels 
the future stuffer-of-sausages had been blown like 
a thistledown about the habitable and less than 
habitable earth, nowhere striking root. But at 
last, somehow, he stuck in Central America, where 
he put some money into mines and gradually grew 
rich. That was life's hey-day. Marrying a 
Guatemalan girl he had children and content- 
ment and an easy affluence. 

And now mark the perlpatesis and the good 
Greek descent Into misery. Suddenly, In Costa 
Rica, wife and children died of fever and a fail- 
ing investment shore away his wealth. Broken 
In heart and pocket, he returned to Guatemala 



In the Highlands 45 

and there in the good German-American tradi- 
tion took to an old and casual employment. The 
sausages which he made were bought by the Ger- 
man coffee-planters. As these are numerous, 
business went well enough, in a grey and dreary 
fashion. The lonely old wanderer stuffed his 
sausages and smoked his hams and shrugged his 
shoulders at the world, until age and the humors 
of his trade brought rheumatism. Then fell the 
final blow. 

In need of a cure, he entrusted the business to 
his Mexican assistant and went away to the hot 
baths. He returned to empty rooms, to walls 
without pictures, floors without tables or beds or 
chairs or carpets, worst of all to a shop without 
showcase or stock and a shed without machinery. 
A sudden access of nostalgia had swept the Mex- 
ican across the border into a land where there is 
no finding of fugitives and no redress. 

With nothing but the clothes on his back the 
old man had wandered to Totonicapan in the 
hills; and there the baths had cured him. He 
made sausages for the Inn-keeper in lieu of coin 
of the realm. Three times a week he made them ; 
the rest of the time, standing or sitting or re- 
clining, he cursed the English and his rheuma- 
tism and lived forlornly between bed and board. 
In that dirty and uneventful town a long life of 



46 The Land Beyond Mexico 

adventure and marvel was shut up in a forlorn 
old body, fading slowly away into dreary forget- 
fulness. 

I asked him whether ir would do any good to 
make more sausages. "If I make more," he 
answered, "and give them to the Indians to ped- 
dle, they get drunk on the money and the sausages 
go to Hell. In this country," said he with con- 
cluding emphasis, "it's no damned use to 
work. . . ." 

Such is the Sausage-maker's Romance; and if 
the story reads a little differently in the Angel 
Michael's golden book, the fault does not lie 
with me. 



CHAPTER II 

MIRAGE OF QUICHE 

QuEZALTENANGo is the second city of Guate- 
mala. It is not wholly uninteresting, as it offers 
the remnants of an old church, the ready spec- 
tacle of Indian market, and the associations of 
a history of at least four hundred years. It was 
on the nearby plain toward Totonicapan that Al- 
varado fought the tumultuous battle in which 
he broke the power of the Indians of Quiche. 
There is a peculiar flavour to these early inci- 
dents from the days of the conquistadores which, 
like tropic fruit, should be tasted at least once for 
the experience; and I can do no better than to 
serve this meal from the pages of Stephens' 
book:^ 

"We were again on classic soil. The reader 
perhaps requires to be reminded that the city 
stands on the site of the ancient Xelahuh, next to 
Utatlan, the largest city in Quiche, the word 
Xelahuh meaning "under the government of 

\J. L. Stephens. Incidents of Travel in Central America, 
Chiapas, and Yucatan. 2 vols. 1841. Harper & Bros, Long 
out of print, but not impossible to secure. 

47 



48 The Land Beyond Mexico 

ten"; that Is, it was governed by ten principal 
captains, each captain presiding over eight thou- 
sand dwelhngs, in all eighty thousand, and con- 
taining, according to Fuentes, more than three 
hundred thousand inhabitants; that on the defeat 
of Tecum Umam by Alvarado, the inhabitants 
abandoned the city, and fled to their ancient for- 
tresses, Excansel the volcano, and Cekxak, an- 
other mountain adjoining; that the Spaniards en- 
tered the deserted city, and, according to a manu- 
script found in the village of San Andres Xecul, 
their videttes captured the four celebrated 
caciques, whose names, the reader doubtless re- 
members, were Calel Kalek, Ahpopgueham, Cal- 
alahan, and Calelaboy; the Spanish records say 
that they fell on their knees before Pedro Al- 
varado, while a priest explained to them the na- 
ture of the Christian faith, and they declared 
themselves ready to embrace it. Two of them 
were retained as hostages, and the others sent 
back to the fortresses, who returned with such 
multitudes of Indians ready to be baptized, that 
the priests, from sheer fatigue, could no longer 
lift their arms to perform the ceremony." 

I may be fortunate enough to introduce the 
reader to the book from which this passage 
comes. The cumbrous title hides the garrulous 
and adventurous journeys of an American am- 



Mirage of Quiche 49 

bassador in search of a government in the days 
when Central America was a flame of civil wars 
and Guatemala was dominated by a remarkable 
Indian peasant, unable to sign his name but able 
to enforce his will. I came to a Quezaltenango 
void of incidents or life. Stephens reached it 
on the morrow of a revolution needlessly drowned 
in blood. So idle are these days and so stirring 
were those and so striking is the picture of the 
Indian Carrera, that it Is Stephens who is here 
in place. ... 

"Early the next morning Carrera marched into 
Quezaltenango, with the cura and Don Juan as 
prisoners. The municipality waited upon him in 
the plaza; but, unhappily, the Indian Intrusted 
with the letter to Morazan had loitered In the 
town, and at this unfortunate moment presented 
It to Carrera. Before his secretary had finished 
reading It, Carrera, In a transport of fury, drew 
his sword to kill them on the spot with his own 
hand, wounded Molina, the alcalde-mayor, and 
two other members of the municipality, but 
checked himself and ordered the soldiers to seize 
them. He then rode to the corregldor, where 
he again broke out Into fury, and drew his sword 
upon him. A woman in the room threw herself 
before the corregldor, and Carrera struck around 
her several times, but finally checked himself 



$0 The' Lathi Beyond Mexico 

again, and ordered the corregidor to be shot un- 
less he raised live thousand dollars by contri- 
butions upon the town. Don Juan and the cura 
he had locked up in a room with the threat to 
shoot them at live o'clock that afternoon unless 
they paid him one thousand dollars each, and 
the former two hundred, and the latter one hun- 
dred to his secretary. Don Juan w:is the prin- 
cipal merchant in the town, but even for him it 
was difficult to raise that sum. The poor cura 
told Carrera that he was not worth a cent in 
the world except his furniture and books. No 
one was allowed to ^-isit him except the old house- 
keeper who iirst told us the story. Many of his 
friends had fled or hidden themselves away, and 
the old housekeeper ran from place to place with 
notes written bv him, begging five dollars, ten 
dollars, anything she could get. One old lady 
sent him a hundred dollars. At four o'clock, 
with all his efforts, he had raised but seven hun- 
dred dollars: but. after undergoing all the mental 
agonies of death, when the cura had given up 
all hope. Don Juan, who had been two hours at 
liberty, made up the deficiency-, and he was re- 
leased. 

The next morning. Carrera sent to Don Juan 
to borrow his sha^-ing apparatus, and Don Juan 
took them over himself. He had alwavs been 




HIGH STREKT, ANTIGUA 



Mirage of Quiche ji 

on good terms with Carrera, and the latter asked 
him if he had got over his fright, talking with 
him as familiarly as if nothing had happened. 
Shortly afterward he was seen at the window 
playing on a guitar; and in an hour thereafter, 
eighteen members of the municipality, without 
the slightest form of trial, not even a drum-head 
court-martial, were taken but into the plaza and 
shot. They were all the very first men in 
Quezaltenango; and Molina, the alcalde-mayor, 
in family, position, and character was second to 
.no other in the republic. His wife was clinging 
to Carrera's knees, and begging for his life when 
he passed with a file of soldiers. She screamed 
"Robertito"; he looked at her, but did not speak. 
She shrieked and fainted, and before she recov- 
ered her husband was dead. He was taken 
around the corner of the house, seated on a stone, 
and despatched at once. The others were seated 
in the same place, one at a time; the stone and 
the wall of the house were still red with their 
blood. I was told that Carrera shed tears for 
the death of the first two, but for the rest he 
said he did not care." 

The description which Stephens elsewhere gives 
agrees well enough with the Quezaltenango of 
to-day. Yet it was a different town into which 
he rode. For In 1902, to the perplexity of all 



52 The' Land Beyond Mexico 

observers, every living tiling >vhich eould con- 
veniently run or ily abandoned rlie nearby slopes 
of Santa Maria, the extinct volcano; and sud- 
denly, a few days later, the cathedral of Quezal- 
tenango was standing alone above the ruins of 
the town. Santa Maria, though baptized into 
the church with every ritual, had departed from 
the decorum of the saints. In a terrilic explo- 
sion she had blown oif one entire slope of her 
peak, and amid eruption and earthquake Quezal- 
tenango had been destroyed. 

Not long before this murderous disaster a sci- 
entist of distinction had pronounced Santa Maria 
dead. But he might better have said, '^Apar- 
taos, qui' hi joi'c'n no cs miwrta; sine que dtierme.'* 
For among volcanoes there is no death, but only 
quiescence. In them the race of giants is not 
extinct. They are the true owners of Guate- 
mala and men are only the ephemeral tenants 
of their treacherous domain. More and more I 
grew convinced that all there was of strange 
and fascinating and distinctive in that country was 
ultimately traceable either to the Indians or to 
the volcanoes. On these two hangs all that is 
picturesque and imaginative. Artistically they 
are fundamentals, the one giving outline and the 
other adding color. 

In one sense it is onlv too truthful a jest to 



Mirage of Quiche 53 

say that the Indians add color to Guatemala. 
But 1 intended no gametal cynicism. Their bright 
dress, their bare legs and arms, their packs and 
wares more than offset the second-hand Ameri- 
canism which is creeping over the country. Ig- 
norant and superstitious and lazy, at least they 
are still themselves, with a bird's brightness of 
plumage to hide their primeval sadness. 

If they are the hues of the landscape, the vol- 
canoes are the form. 

The race of volcanoes are the Greeks of the 
mountain-world, even as the Swiss Alps are its 
romanticists. Definite and logical, instinct with 
form, full of concealed energy, dark-souled withal 
and drawn to imaginative and terrible catastro- 
phes, they combine an ordered calm of appear- 
ance with the restlessness of an unsuppressible 
interior ferment. Because they are not, like 
merely pretty things, negligible in the sphere of 
our action, they can attain to true beauty. Tran- 
scending the passivity of mere outward perfec- 
tion, they are more than the insipid beings of the 
classic revivals : they are true Greeks. And like 
the Greeks, though they have been seemingly 
dead two thousand years or more we yet dare not 
ignore them to-day. 

And so it is that a volcano does not merely add 
its peak to a landscape, any more than a new 



54 The Land Beyond Mexico 

outline merely adds its contour to a drawing. 
For the entire picture is so affected by the in- 
trusion that the whole complex of emotions is 
changed. 

Volcanoes, I am convinced, are wonderful 
things and more than the mere vent-holes of a 
crass subcutaneous condition in the terrestrial 
monster upon whom we lead our parasitic lives. 
Among their distinctions they include a prop- 
erty which I had imagined to be peculiar to Look- 
ing-glass Land: one can see them only by riding 
away from them. If one rides toward them, 
little by little, they disappear; and if one still 
persists so far as to try to ascend them, they 
vanish altogether and leave the rider amid huge 
forests on steep and interminable trails. 

Quezaltenango is far enough distant from 
Santa Maria to make its sharp cone visible; but 
one must ride some fifteen miles further away 
into the hills around the town of St. Francis the 
High before its perfect and beautiful propor- 
tions rise completely into view. Best of all, it 
should be seen from ship-board on the Pacific. 
Then the broad level of the lowlands gives a 
ground-line from which the volcanoes rise, in color 
a pale greyish blue like smoke, a ragged and 
mighty line facing the sea. Tajumulco, Santa 
Maria, Atitlan, Fire, Water, — elsewhere in the 



Mirage of Quiche 55 

world there may be such a company, but I do not 
know where to look for it. Their height is no 
arbitrary mental calculation from an invisible 
level. Twelve and thirteen thousand feet they 
rise before the eye. Toward noon the clouds 
cover them and they drift off into the thickening 
sky, till it seems impossible that those sharp cones 
and perfect lines were ever there. But the next 
morning, pale and exquisitely clear, they float 
against the sunrise far astern. 

But I was writing of Quezaltenango before the 
typical dullness of that prosperous httle place in- 
duced me to turn to Santa Maria and her choleric 
tribe. 

North of the town there is much dull country, 
high water-worn table-land covered with corn and 
wheat and broken by bare tracts where the grass 
grows in tall isolated clumps. There one rides 
for hours with goal in sight and tires of every 
journey before it is ended. 

Ordinarily the roads hereabouts are without 
life or interest; but on market-days they are trans- 
formed. St. Francis stands on a high bare ridge 
with the whitewashed cupola of its church visible 
across the countryside. Friday is full market. 
Up the steep winding pathways to the town the 
Indians toil in the sun, driving pigs and lambs, 



^6 The Land Beyond Mexico 

the women with live turkey and other fowl slung 
on their back or with baskets on their heads, the 
men bent beneath their canisters. Even the small 
children come and do their share of transporta- 
tion. Every yard of the square in front of the 
white church is covered. It is a tattered spec- 
tacle of many colors, and from a distance resem- 
bles a briUiant rag-quilt. And that, indeed, it is. 
The great tailor-made Republic north of Mexico 
little knows how much of the spirit of the Levant 
lurks on its own progressive and western conti- 
nent. The line where the scavenger-buzzards be- 
gin marks a world unknown or ignored. 

It is more interesting country to the West 
toward the Mexican frontier. Two hours out 
from Quezaltenango the hills are white with vol- 
canic sand through which breaks the green of 
the maize. Further on, russet is added to the 
green and the white, and these three tones every- 
where prevail. There is similar country in the 
Pyrenees where, too, in spite of the arid soil and 
the monotonous landscape the bare clear hills lit- 
tle by little press their inexplicable fascination till 
they grow to be part of one's memory and expec- 
tation. 

These are fine hills for idle goers. On one side 
of the ridge the view drops back to the plain 
capped by the perfect cone of Santa Maria. Los- 



Mirage of Quiche 57 

ing this prospect one rides through the great 
woodlands of the mountain-crest and comes out 
on the other side upon another world, where be- 
yond upland meadows rolls a lower land, wave 
after wave, to the smoky-blue hills of the Mexican 
border. As one keeps the crest these two views 
alternate. It is a solitary ride, quite off the trav- 
elled track; and if one does not wish to sleep 
by a tethered mule under a raining sky it is well 
to be off the ridge long before sundown. Riding 
lazily along, with my eyes out over forty miles 
of shower-streaked summer land, I came to a kind 
of moor, treeless and wild, with high clumps of 
grass on every side. Ten thousand feet above 
the sea can almost bring Scotch heather under 
the fifteenth circle. And here I met three way- 
farers who had come up from the plains with 
their packs. They were a rascally looking crew 
(as the pirate-books say) and when they saw me 
riding alone on the blasted heath the three took 
a position on either side of the path and waited 
for me to come up. Withered and wild as was 
their attire they turned out to be good-natured, 
simple-hearted hill-people who owned a couple 
of farms on the slope of the moor. They had 
been to town fifteen miles away, had left at day- 
break and were only just returning; and what 
was I doing? merely looking? not selling sewing- 



58 The Land Beyond Mexico 

machines? with no commission at all? So we 
talked for a little about this and that, and said 
good-by. And such in general are the people of 
the country, simple and poor and kind. The soli- 
tary traveller is safer in this "lawless" land than 
in our own civilised communities of the North. 

Farther to the West, beyond the ridge which I 
have been describing, lies the department of San 
Marcos, more orderly and prosperous than is the 
Guatemalan wont. At a trifurcation of the road 
stand three signs which amaze one not a little : 
"Short-cut to San Marcos," pipes the little cen- 
tral trail; "Wagon-road to San Marcos," an- 
nounces his broader neighbor to the right; "For 
Automobiles," booms the aristocrat to the left. 
All honour to the far-sighted Department which 
can look forward to that fusion of motor-car and 
aeroplane which alone will ever pass that way! 
Occasional bridges are omitted and the cross-cut 
sawings of the mountain torrents are ignored with 
dignit}^; but what does it matter? The road 
and the sign are there : that is the main thing. 
And no automobile has come to grief, — there are 
none in that part of the country. 

The approach to the town lies through a 
straight dark avenue of firs at the end of which 
a gentleman-warrior (to me unknown) leans peril- 



Mirage of Quiche 59 

ously out from his pedestal. Four cabalistic 
carven dates serve to endear him to his country's 
memory. The town itself lies in pleasant fields 
surrounded by hills. On a high bastion in the 
centre a paved platform looks out over the house- 
tops. At its back stands an armoury, a real 
armoury, with look-out towers and swallow-tail 
battlements. This gives a military tone to the 
town. One feels that it is indeed only twenty- 
five miles to the frontier, that the bayonet and 
rifle rule on the Guatemalan border, that beyond 
those hills hes the lawless land. Besides, San 
Marcos thinks and speaks freely, — as the gov- 
ernment would say, seditiously; and the sight of 
soldiery is always a good deterrent on a too- 
progressive department of a Central American 
republic. The townspeople seem active and ef- 
ficient. Was it imagination, or were they also 
correspondingly less open and less courteous? 
After all, is it only the good-for-nothings in this 
world that are thoroughly lovable, only the shift- 
less who are good-natured, the incapable who 
have a soul and the brainless who have a heart? 
I hope not. Yet there are times in the tropics 
when the shadow of doubt runs over all that en- 
ergetic Northern civilisation, of whose claims to 
supremacy not all of us are always so eloquent 
or so convinced. 



6o The' l.iinJ BcxonJ Mc'xico 

At the hotel I came upon a courtyard full of 
gaycty. The lan-kceper's little daughter was 
holduig a birthday party and the space was 
crowded with children. Music was freely dis- 
pensed by a marimba, native glorification of the 
xylophone. The physics of this instrument are 
not uninteresting. Under each key of the wooden 
keyboard hangs a hollow tube of appropriate 
length, whose colunm of air vibrates to the note. 
This gives a resonant background and adds 
greatly to the timbre. A mere xylophone has 
something of the dr}Tiess of footsteps on a frosty 
morning or the shallow brilliance of an Oxford 
exhibitioner: and this defect the marimba over- 
comes. But as it also assumes the qualits- of a 
piano played with damper raised, it is confusing 
nither than clear and carries with it some of the 
excitement of shouting or of moving crowds. 
Consequently it is :U its best while playing mar- 
tial or stirring tunes in the open air, when, if 
cunningly belabored, it becomes really rousing. 

The children danced in and out under the dr}'- 
ing garments of the week's wash. Yet it seemed 
as if even the frankness of these surroundings 
did not put them at ease. They were stiflt and 
formal toward each other, in that delightful and 
unnecessary way which children adopt at their 
own parties until the rough-and-tumble of some 




ROAD AND RUIN, ANTIGUA 



Mirage of Quiche 61 

game makes them forget the starch and creases. 

But there were no gam.es on that occasion. The 
little boys struggled with the dance-steps and 
their best shoes, while the little girls displayed 
their conviction of an innate grace. Yet conscious 
aptitude and awkwardness ended at last. In the 
sight of all, a bright-coloured plaster bomb was 
knocked down from its swinging perch below the 
rafters, combining in its subsequent behaviour the 
good tradition of Humpty-Dumpty with the less 
pleasant one of shrapnel. There was a rush for 
the burst of little presents, and homo naturalis 
resumed his rule. 

I judged that the marimberos were hired by 
the day; for the departure of the children af- 
fected them not at all. Their repertoire com- 
bined the American musical comedy with South 
American tunes. Of native melodies there were 
none; but I could not discover whether the omis- 
sion implied a non-existence or merely well-bred 
suppression. There is said to be much native 
Mexican music, and the enthusiasm for the ma' 
rimba seems to imply an indigenous interest. But 
it was with "0 la hella luna'' and with the Dollar- 
Princess that I had to satisfy my taste for the 
exotic. 

I went no further toward Mexico, but turned 



62 The Land Beyond Mexico 

northward from San Marcos, and at length east- 
ward, until I was riding back on a parallel course, 
with incidental amusement and discomfort 
enough, but little to chronicle until I came to 
Santa Cruz Quiche and the broad green valley 
wherefrom the two great rivers of Guatemala 
rise. 

It is an amusing plain through which to ride; 
for though it seems perfectly level, it cannot be 
traversed in a straight line from any direction. 
The roads and paths twist about sudden ravines 
and vast earth-crevasses, crossing on narrow 
tongues between five-hundred foot abysses, or 
plunge deep down into shadowy hollows wherein 
grow great trees whose peaks never reach the 
level plain. These barrancas are, next to the vol- 
canoes, the most distinctive element of Guate- 
malan scenery. Occasionallv they afford spectacu- 
lar views, as when the road suddenly emerges on 
the brink of some great valley with steep un- 
cloven sides in whose deep bed winds a stream. 
Ride half a mile further and you will look back 
over a level plain, unable to believe in the ex- 
istence of what your own eyes saw so recently. 
Below Santo Tomas, for example, there is such 
a view. I came upon it unexpectedly at sunset 
after rain, and though I cannot describe it, neither 
can I forset it. 



Mirage of Quiche 63 

But my chronicle begins a fev/ miles further 
West, at Santa Cruz Quiche, to which I woke on 
a sunny Sunday morning. It was fiesta and 
rockets were wasting themselves in the full glare 
of day, while a turkey in the courtyard was greet- 
ing every explosion with a gobble of enthusiasm 
so accurately timed that it must have been that 
pitiless recurrence of "zzzz . . . bang . . . gob- 
ble" which awakened me. I looked out over the 
littered court below. At one loud explosion a 
flock of birds wheeled by in terror and I thought 
of the piazza of St. Mark's in Venice and the 
pigeons flying up at the sound of the sunset can- 
non. A sudden ennui came over me, a disgust of 
the dirty unlettered towns and of the whole fer- 
tile and futile, beautiful and barbarian land to 
which I had exiled myself for a summer's caprice. 
One has such feelings on waking in an unknown 
Indian village with the memory of a long day's 
ride still in one's arms and legs. The emotion 
wears away almost as quickly as the physical fa- 
tigue; but it is well to recall its poignancy In after- 
days when one looks back with self-deceiving 
regret to the joys of solitary muleback In New 
Spain. 

I was Intent on seeing the ruins. Near Santa 
Cruz once stood the capital of the Indians In the 
days of the Spanish conquistadores and some of 



64 The Laud Beyond Mexico 

the walls of their ancient town still stand with 
broken towers visible afar. With a small boy 
of ten years for my guide, I started out on foot 
and came in twenty minutes to rubble walls, drear 
but real remnants of Indian work. 

Thanks to those curious earth-crevasses of 
which I have spoken, the town had been defended 
by natural moats hundreds of feet deep, upon 
whose inner lip rose the fortification walls. The 
general workmanship was rather poor. Though 
some of the stones had been hewn, the technique 
was after all only a mud-concrete, quite unlike the 
marvellously jointed Inca masonry of Peru. At 
one point were traces of a gateway and remnants 
of a tower, still some twenty-five feet in height, 
roughly square, with a slight batter. Half-way 
up, it had a guard-room, as though hollowed out, 
with traces of the incline of the stairway which 
led up to it. 

The site is strewn with fragments of coarsely 
glazed red earthen-ware of rather uniform clay, 
showing traces of the potter's wheel. I picked up 
quantities of obsidian splinters, black volcanic 
glass, the tools of this early folk. I found also 
a little head of terracotta, slightly rough, but full 
of traces of a finer touch than one would have 
expected. 

In the side of the steep slope of one of the 



Mirage of Quiche 6$ 

guarding ravines there is a gallery hewn in the 
soft rock, — a passage some twelve feet high and 
some hundred yards long with small chambers 
opening off on either side. One of these rooms 
ends in a sudden pit, a black vertical shaft lead- 
ing (the natives told me) to a lower floor with 
many rooms. All are empty; and the walls are 
without trace of ornament. They seem to have 
served as store-rooms rather than burial vaults. 
Poking and peering about by candle-light deep 
in the hillside, I felt some of that sense of slip- 
ping out of place in the centuries which I take 
to be the emotional element of a first visit to the 
Palaeolithic caverns of Spain and the Dordogne. 
But here there was drawn neither bison nor elk. 
There was only the bare testimony of the dark 
and empty passages. 

Gazing from these feeble remnants of power 
out over the most beautiful plain in the coun- 
try, I could not realize that this was the Utatlan 
of which I had read, that here had been human 
sacrifice to Indian gods, that here had come Al- 
varado with his Spaniards and broken the last 
resistance of a mighty people. Guarded by the 
great ravines here had been palaces of the kings 
of Quiche with courts and towers and decorated 
walls, altars and idols, chieftains and warriors. 
Only a hundred years ago (if we are to trust 



66 The J.auiJ Beyond Mexico 

Stephens' informants) the pahice with its garden 
was still to be seen. Thirty years later Stephens 
himself saw the ruins of the altar of sacrifice but 
otherwise little more than I. In that short in- 
terval had come the suspicion of hidden treasure 
and the destruction of the buildings that Alvarado 
had spared. Ichabod, indeed! It all exists only 
in printed books and old handwritings (although 
it may be that it never existed elsewhere in quite 
the sumptuous glory of the chroniclers). Cer- 
tainly it lives no longer on the green plain of 
Santa Cruz, though the corn still springs, no 
doubt, from the moulderings of Indians and Span- 
iards slain in battle. 

"Well," said the friendly inn-keeper on my re- 
turn to the modern town a mile away, "and how 
were the ruins? For my own part, I have never 
troubled to go to look at them.'' Yet he had 
lived there all his life. 

I found Santa Cruz a little less unendurable 
than I had expected. Its town-square has un- 
usual distinction. At dusk, especially, it has the 
charm which often comes with the not too clearly 
seen. Then there stand against the sky three 
tall forms whose mutual contrast is like the con- 
trast of different races. There is the tower of the 
garrison, in three receding stories, well-poised and 
graceful, a memory of Spain. Then there is the 



Mirage of Quiche 67 

fagade of the church, stiffly vertical, a mask and 
a sham, Hke the false front of an early Tuscan 
church. Between the two is the blown bubble of 
the cupola above the transept, a thing of curving 
outline and balanced thrusts and strains, crying 
attention to a mechanical function well performed. 
These are the three against the sky. But Santa 
Cruz has no idea what they all mean. 

>|c 5[5 :)c >|: s(: :)c >)c 

I rode in the late afternoon to Santo Tomas, — 
whose simple and pious name appeals to the na- 
tives less than their own long-drawn and sibilant 
Chichicastenango. It stands on a hill rather 
prettily; but further than that I know little about 
it. For I left at dawn and rode through wild 
country, up and down by ridge and gorge, grad- 
ually mounting through ragged hillsides to high 
unwooded slopes with ever-widening views of the 
plain of Quiche, the valley of the River Mo- 
tagua, and the blue barrier mountains which 
guard the low, wet, and wild jungles of Peten. 
I met no one and passed no houses for many 
miles. But the world grew broader and broader 
till it came to be a vast spectacle of trembling 
light whose distances were as blue as the back- 
ground hills of the Venetian painters. The path 
was hot and stony, up and up without pity. Near 
the ridge came a last open view as wonderful 



68 The Land Beyond Mexico 

In width and power as anything in all the coun- 
try; and then the road took to the great, cool 
forest, and the light of the far blue hills and 
lowlands was suddenly shut out, to reappear no 
more. At the damp watershed I crossed a waving 
meadow of thistles and forget-me-nots, — fit sym- 
bol of the mixed feehngs of the traveller who 
has climbed those arid hills for hours without 
food or friend, yet has been rewarded by the 
ever-memorable blue of those clear fifty-mile ex- 
panses. 

A long winding descent on the other side led 
down into the high cornland from which my jour- 
ney had commenced nearly a month ago. I had 
been to Mexico and back, with interest but with- 
out adventure, keeping always to the ridge of the 
continent and the cool open uplands. And now 
I was riding in the last of Los Altos, heading 
eastward for Guatemala City and the slow de- 
scent to warmer lands. 

Having ridden all day without food, I was 
both tired and hungry when I reached Tecpan. 
But I postponed dinner and sleep to watch the 
natives with lighted candles escort Christ to the 
village church. Dressed in a cheap imitation of 
purple brocade, his face tear-stained and pitiable, 
he had stumbled to his knees beneath his cross. 
He was borne on a platform upon the shoulders 



Mirage of Quiche 69 

of four men while a few brass horns Improvised 
a sort of Ases Tod. Before him two tall battered 
candlesticks from the altar had joined the proces- 
sion. Behind came the Indians and the lighted 
candles, — large candles, small candles, fat ones 
and lean ones, twisted ones, colored ones, all with 
their gob of fire. The Httle girls were enjoying 
the excitement of keeping the thin flames alight, 
and whispered and pushed and giggled. The 
women were clearly devotional, the men ceremoni- 
ous. The sun was down, and this bafbarian cor- 
tege moving through the gathering nightfall 
seemed like the funeral of some Cachiquel hero. 
Indeed, I asked a man with a wart on his face 
what festival this was and whether some one was 
dead. "It is Christ," said he, "coming from the 
house where he lives." That is all I learned. 
Candles and music passed down the street and 
I went in to dinner. 

Below Tecpan there is a rocky hole low down 
in the green bank and through it the traveller 
sees trees growing and the light shining, as though 
within that hill were a garden of the good people. 
It is a queer and unexplained glimpse and I was 
careful to leave it so, lest that fragile faith in 
the folk of the hollow hills should be crushed 
once more when the miracle was understood. 



70 The Lmid BeyonJ Mc:\i.\^ 

My experience at Santa Cruz made me unam- 
bitious to search out the stones of the old Indian 
strv^nghold of Teepan-Ouauramala. 1 cared 
more for the clear stream and green grass and 
HngHs^h shadows below the to^%'n. things neither 
primitive nor intangible. Any one with half a 
soul in his body will do the same in Guatemala 
or in Turkey or any ancient land, and turn from 
the Hve graceless stones of an ancient town, 
thankful that the sky does not crumble nor the 
landscape pass away. 

This is the cornheld of the gods, comparable 
to the Lombardy plain whose vast stalks of maize, 
rioting in the heat, so strongly affect the traveller 
cx>me down from the cold and rainy T>to1. But 
here the aloes line the lanes and down in the 
barrancas unfamiliar shadow falls close from the 
tropical trees. It is a world of its own, good to 
ride in. growing gradually beloved as its t^rsr 
strangeness and hostile formlessness wear away. 
The villages are hidden in the lields. Five min- 
utes* riding leaves them behind, with only the 
white dome of the church looking out across the 
level com. 

The volcanoes re-appeared, first Fire and then 
Water. Three miles to the south of me was 
Patzizia, the rainy village from which I began 
my book. At Zaragoza I was in the hi^iroad to 



Mirage of Quiche 71 

the capital, amon^ mules ancJ horsc3 and ox-carts. 
At Chimaltcnango xny senses, trained to loneli- 
ness, resented the advanced civilisation which a 
month ago I could not even discern. Guatemala 
City would only depress me with its reckless mo- 
dernity. So I turned aside and rocje rjown into the 
basin between the volcanoes, down into the hlack- 
grecn of coffee-farms where the hillsides were 
like thunder-clouds of outward-bellying trees and 
the road was dark with bamboo and fern and 
palm. And so through delightful shadow of 
greenery I came to the one town of real interest 
in the land, the oldest in Central America, An- 
tigua, City of St. James of Gentlemen. 



CHAPTER III 

ANTIGUA 

Picture a round green valley, a bowl whose 
ragged edge is an encircling line of wooded ridges 
and sharp volcanic peaks. Below a sky bluer 
than that of Sicily the woods begin, compact and 
billowy as summer thunder-caps. Below these are 
dark stretches of coffee-plants, and down in the 
bottom of the bowl is a checker of red roofs and 
white domes. That is i\ntigua. 

Suspicion might well attach to any vista which 
claims to be more lovely than a glimpse into this 
cup of green. Its nearest rival, Florence from 
Fiesole, cannot match it for mere beauty. The 
elements, indeed, are much the same: red-tiled 
roofs of a town below, a valley-basin, and enclos- 
ing hills. But Italy can never wholly conceal nor 
reconcile its soil's decrepitude. Its landscapes 
have an arid hint of three thousand years of 
peasant farming. That is part of its charm, no 
doubt; but the charm of the New-World's fresh 
fertility is truer to our instinctive preference of 
live things to dead. 

72 



Antigua 73 

Yet Florence is unrivalled, because we see it 
with our minds and memories. Just so, few peo- 
ple of intellectual integrity would exchange the 
Alban hills for my great volcanoes or an acre 
of the Campagna for all the coffee-plantations of 
Guatemala. But Antigua, alone in Central Amer- 
ica, has this same mirage of the past upon it 
to make enchantment out of dirty streets and 
crumbling stones. For Brunelleschi's dome there 
are only the white cupolas of the Spanish churches, 
yet these are leaven of art enough to make the 
bread of life. 

I have ventured the comparison with Florence. 
Yet what have I to offer to match an hour's walk 
on the Lung' Arno past the bridges and back by 
the Palazzo Vecchio and the Mercato with Or 
San Michele? Not much, I fear. In Antigua 
one loves little things. It is enough to stare at 
a house-corner with a queer window-seat, or to 
mark a cactus' ear springing from the joint of a 
roof, most fantastic of finials. And after all, is 
not this the spirit of those who really love Flor- 
ence — to look for the casual, which is the true 
artistic? And would not a rambling painter bless 
the fertility which turns roof-tiles into the green 
of moss and the golden-yellow and yellow-green 
of mouldy growths, in a wealth and play of colour 
that even Italy cannot show? Yet in spite of 



74 The LaHd Beyond Mrxico 

the warning-, my hour's walk may seem so very 
trivial! . . . 

Here is an open shop. A Spanish girl has 
brought her poodle to be sheared. She has 
stretched the little animal out on the counter; 
the scissors are already at work on his woolly 
overcoat. From the main square a drum snares 
and two ambitious buglers plunge through an ill- 
advised call. It is the stroke of the hour. A 
school is reciting in unison at the top of unmellow 
childish voices some lesson of the day. 

Occasional dark sliadows cross the white and 
dusty street. Look up and you will see dark birds 
on the bright blue sky, graded from the sharp 
large wing^ of the lower levels to small blotches 
a mile in air. These are the scavengers, the 
pest-averters, cleaners of street and court. These 
are the buzzards. They sit on the roofs, their 
ugly grey -cow led faces thrust forward, their necks 
bent. They stalk in the streets, sombre and 
evil. In the dean sky they bring the pollution 
of their carrion-fed bodies. A malign benevo- 
lence, they ward over the tropic lands. One sees 
their circling company high in air, while the foot- 
hills still hide the villages from view. A map 
of the sky abo\-ie Centnil Americ:i with only the 
bu/zards indicatevi would perform every- service 
of a gazetteer. 



Antigua 75 

Al)()vc l:hc one-story houses the old churches 
seem like giants of ancient days; for ruin and 
desolation add to their apparent si/e. I fere, too, 
the hu///ards perch on the hroken walls. Inside, 
the floors are lost in vegetation. You may sec 
the rents which the carth(|uakes made through 
masonry so many feet thick that it leaves f;nly tlie 
more apparent the vanity of the huildcrs. I'he 
facades have still their saints in the niches. In 
the side walls great (jctagonal ports with double 
splay still mark the windows. Here and there, 
the springings of the vaults, the arches of the 
doors are standing. 

A blind beggar with his dog is going his well- 
planned round. . . . f^ver the portal of the 
courtyard of the church of San Buenaventura 
stands the little saint in person, dressed in pretty 
blue, with a broad-brimmed black hat and a staff. 
His tilted face has a melancholy and pathetic 
air, in contrast to his spruce and bright attire. 
. . . An Indian girl passes, carrying vases of bril- 
liant flowers for the church. 

Everywhere along the street there are glimpses 
through open doorways into gardens and court- 
yards. How fine to have a sixty-foot tree in one's 
house I . . . On a roof there is growing a 
prickly-pear, like the hairy green ears of some 



7^ The Land Btryond Af exico 

strange elephantine animal who lives in the house 
beneath. 

Inside the cathedral the shrines are loaded 
with dolls in brilli;mt frocks. These wax-tigures 
in muslin clothes with sweeping wings of tin are 
the queen of heaven and the angelic company 
for whom the candles are lighted and the rockets 
make their noise, for whom the bells clatter and 
a shrewd church holds its ceremony of tinsel and 
vestments and incense. 

Then there are the Indian women washing in 
line along the street, each before a stone basin 
which she iSUs with water from a central pool. 

Last of all, there is the mined church which 

serves for Indian market. That is a charmed 

haunt, always with much to sell and much to see. 

May the God of the North help the temperate 

stomach which ever encounters the food that one 

here sees mashed and stirred and brewed I The 

mere look of some of it can make one ill. But 

the rest is all brilliant colour of clothes against 

the darii skins of the women, of baskets of fruit 

against the mouldy walls, and of an open blue 

sky over all. 

And that, briefly, is an hours walk in Antigua. 
******* 

In these lands the houses are built with large 
bricks of sun-dried mud. These, if thev stood 



Antigua jj 

alone and exposed to the weather, the rains would 
soon disintegrate; but thickly plastered with 
stucco, they seem to wear as well in that chmate 
as our more costly structures in colder lands. 

It would be easy to paint a picture of an An- 
tiguan street, A child's box of colours has every- 
thing needful. The first house is to be light ver- 
milion, the next blue, the next yellow, the next 
lilac, all in clear bright colours set side by side 
without transition. The effect is naive and sim- 
ple-souled. It brings with it a child's gayety. It 
has the spirit of a Noah's-Ark, a toy-town shin- 
ing in the sun. 

The houses are all of a single story with over- 
hanging eaves set at slightly different levels. 
Looking down the vista of houses, one has the 
illusion that one could ride along the sidewalk 
and touch the eaves with uplifted hand. In real- 
ity the windows and ceilings are very high, mak- 
ing the rooms airy and cool. The house-fronts 
are necessarily long; for the people live in ex- 
tens o, since they may not live in alto. Though 
the volcanoes are almost wholly extinct, earth- 
quakes are perennial, as the story of the town 
will witness; and for that reason the two safe 
dimensions in domestic architecture have to make 
up for the perilous third. The fronts are plain, 
a flat expanse of uniform colour broken only by 



78 The Land Beyond Mexico 

large window-grills that project out into the side- 
walk. An Antiguan window is not, as with us, 
a mere glazed hole in the wall; for between the 
iron bars of the outer grill and the glass of the 
casement there is a little territory, in the street 
but not of it, a little balcony where one may lean 
one's arms and gaze up-village and down. Here 
the women put the little children and close the 
window behind them. Out-of-door prisoners, they 
watch securely the grown-up world through the 
gratings of their little cell. These self-same 
windows have also another common use, though 
I should suppose a certain tantalization to be at- 
tendant upon the ceremony. As the Spanish catch 
goes, 

And perilous spots are the window-places 

For mothers whose daughters have pretty faces! 

The streets are all alike, save where around 
the central square the blank walls give way to 
open shops. Such is Antigua from without. But 
nearly every one of all those unattractive fronts 
hides a courtyard full of flowers and shrubs and 
running water, and no passer-by can tell how much 
or how little luxury and comfort the tinted plaster 
conceals. 

It is a tropical instinct to ignore street-fronts 



Antigua 79 

and to live about an internal court. Where our 
northern windowed houses gape like sponges or 
honey-combs upon the street, the ancient Greek 
and Roman and the modern Levantine and Span- 
ish dwellings turn blank faces to the passer-by and 
live secluded about their hidden yard, whose tem- 
pered sunlight and flowers and caged birds are a 
refuge from the barren and dusty world without. 
I think that the honest visitor to Pompeii 
might well allow that the sight of the ancient 
houses, even where the peristyles have been re- 
built and replanted, has never brought that feel- 
ing of comfort which emanates from the really 
liveable and homelike. In the grey desolation 
of that terrible skeleton of an ancient town, the 
classic mirage makes life distant and chilly and 
Latin. But in Antigua the Pompeian house lives 
again, to take us back to the year 70 without the 
qualms of erudition and to make a real and pres- 
ent pleasure out of the dreary ruined matter of 
our Italian memories. The delight of houses lies 
always in the discovery of their fitness to be lived 
in; and here in Antigua life is unusually lovely 
with its dreamy fusion of out-of-doors and in. 
The open court is a garden of colour and per- 
fume. Plants hang in swinging pots and birds 
sing in wooden cages. Sitting beneath the red 
slope of the roof that runs around this inner para- 



8o The Land Beyond Mexico 

dise, one sees the familiar cone of Agua standing 
over the town as Vesuvius stands above Pompeii. 
The comparison is only too fitting. Fertile and 
undreaded, both have destroyed those who trusted 
to their deceptive protection and lived so serenely 
at their feet. 

The Antlguan churches are built of brick laid 
in thick mortar to form a concrete mass. Walls, 
arches, vaults, and domes are all so constructed, 
and all are remarkable for their solidit}% This 
gigantic Roman technique is enlivened in true an- 
cient Roman manner bv a facing of decorated 
stucco, behind which the true structure vanishes, 
while a more or less plausible system of "Greek" 
columns and entablatures makes feeble pretence 
of responsibility. 

^Yhere the buildings lie in ruins, one can but 
admire the tenacity of this concrete. Fallen 
vaults lie in gigantic masses. Instead of crumbled 
mortar and scattered brick, huge striped boulders 
block the way. The Spaniards built against 
earthquake; and though they failed, they proved 
themselves great builders, followers in the struc- 
tural traditions of Imperial Rome. 

Their ornamentation was of another sort. 
Heirs to the undlscrlmlnatlng decadence of the 
last of the Renaissance, they played the usual 



Antigua 8 1 

havoc with their inheritance. They wound stucco 
spirals around the simple uprightness of the 
classic column. They finished the faqades with 
ungainly volutes. They broke the wall-spaces with 
unnecessary niches in which they put bishops and 
angels and saints. And finally they attacked span- 
drels and lunettes with moulded and painted ara- 
besques. One can hardly imagine to what height 
of revelry this mania for stucco twinery could 
lead, until he has seen these ruins. On one f agade 
which I well remember, column-bases, shafts, and 
capitals were overlaced with leaf-patterns; the 
entablature was a succession of braid and vine and 
scroll; the wall-niches were covered and crowned 
with intricate designs; and not an inch of wall- 
space was left without ornament. The Gothic 
outline that topped the doorway made spandrel- 
room for bewigged and wild-eyed angels amid 
a truly tropical luxuriance of auxiliary fillings. 
The result is marvellous in its richness and gor- 
geous at a distance, but disappointing on closer 
scrutiny. In any case, it is a masterpiece because 
it is the consummation of its kind. It deserves 
the most careful preservation in detail photo- 
graphs and coloured drawings. There could 
hardly be a better memorial of Spanish influence 
In America than an exhaustive and adequate pub- 
lication of the Antiguan ruins. 



82 The Land B,r\\r.! Mexico 

In the old cathedral is yet another remarkable 
example ot moulded stucce». The sunlight pours 
through the fallen dome and thus illumines the 
pendentives and the crowning circular frieze in 
all their richness of intertwining ornament. In 
each pendentive stands an angel dressed in broad 
flounced skirt and ribboned knee-boots which give 
a strange air of earthly cavalier to these inhab- 
itants of heaven. They swing censers against an 
amazing background of writhing and interlacing 
cords, above which there circles a frieze as intri- 
cate as tiligree. Above the aisles stretch wall- 
spaces between the pendentives, and these are 
pierced by a splayed window whose receding 
mouldings have the richest and le.ist analysable 
oniament of all. 

But it must not be supposed that all the churches 
have this abundant gn\ce of surface. On the con- 
trary, some of the facades are ugly in their plain- 
ness. The solidity of their walls is echoed in 
heavy windoA\-s, squat columns, and deep niches. 
A favorite feature is a great octagonal window, 
heavily splayed, which looks like a gig-antic port- 
hole between the heavy buttresses. Even the 
niches not uncommonly assume this form, and the 
unfortunate facades become unwieldy and grace- 
less. 

For the rest, these old churches are a matter 



Antigua 83 

for the wandering idler or the architectural his- 
torian. For the one tliey are inexhaustible in 
their ruined charm and the spell of their associa- 
tions; for the other they have a variety that only 
the trained eye can truly see. 

Antigua is viewed in half a day, yet known and 
understood not even by those who have visited it 
a score of times, much less (of course) by those 

who live there all their lives. 

******* 

The church of Santa Clara is unmolested by 
antiquarian veneration. Muck of a cow-stable 
covers the narrow space in front of its fac^ade. 
The portico is an Indian's home. A tiny fire 
smokes on the once holy floor, and gourds and 
dirty cooking-things lie littered about. When I 
visited it no one was at home. \n the roofless 
nave I found a patch of corn with banana-plants 
down the middle and an Indian girl curled up 
asleep on a bundle of dirty rags. In the cloister 
the heavy vegetation hid the ruins of the two- 
storied ambulatory. \n the centre, within a 
thicket, stood the old fountain with water still 
running into its many-sided basin. I could not 
help feeling that not one mere Indian girl, but 
all the old grandeur of Spain was sleeping there, 
ruined and overgrown. No one thinks of it or 
cares for it now. Rain and sunlight stream into 



84 The Land Beyond Mexico 

the house of incense and candle-light, that a dirty- 
Indian may live on bananas and corn where his 
ancestors knelt at prayer. 

Nearby are greater ruins and mightier desola- 
tion. No doubt it is a great exaggeration to com- 
pare the church of St. Francis with the Baths of 
Caracalla. Yet some kindred emotion haunts 
this greatest of Antiguan rehcs, which, like the 
Roman, has its own secret of largeness and vast- 
ness. The piers and many of the arches still 
stand; but the roof has fallen in, bringing, as in 
Santa Clara, sun and rain through its shattered 
vaulting to foster a riot of green in every place 
where seeds may fall or blow. There is still some 
of the old carving on the spandrels of the de- 
pressed arches which carry the schola cantorum — 
rosettes and twining ribbons. Here and there in 
other parts painted arabesques shine with a clear 
and unexpected freshness of blue or green or 
brown. But it is the rank desolation and the 
emptiness that bring a sense of greatness for 
which the actual measurements give no warrant. 

Adjoining are ample ruins of refectory and 
dormitory which serve to increase the impression 
of one-time ecclesiastical magnificence. 

One of the old bells, a fine piece of figured 
casting, hangs in the belfry of the church. From 
its crumbling eyrie one looks across Antigua. 



Antigua 85 

Santa Clara is in the foreground. Beyond stand 
the cathedral and the mayoralty and the barracks 
which frame the Plaza. Beyond these are red 
roofs, and beyond these the hills. 

On the whole, though there was much build- 
ing, it was not a period of great architects. The 
structures were simple and massive ; the plans are 
straightforward and obvious, as good plans 
should be. But as the ornamentation is accessory 
rather than integral, with all the illogical and 
unnecessary evils of the baroque, I imagine that 
they make finer ruins than they ever made archi- 
tecture. Their number and nearness to each 
other are barely explicable. The townsmen claim 
the ruins of more than forty churches. I failed 
to count more than half that number, but a greater 
patience might well have been rewarded. There 
must have been a vast clan of priests; and though 
in Spanish days the capital may have been a 
larger town than the present Antigua, yet the 
most generous calculations leave a host of idle 
churches and idle churchmen. Old accounts add 
that the furnishings were very costly, and that 
gold and precious stones were plentiful. Legend, 
perhaps; yet it must have been a strange period 
of priestly splendour dominating a simple and 
pious savage race. From all of that, enough re- 
mains to make Antigua a charmed spot such as 



86 The Land Beyond Mexico 

we find so often in the Old World and look for so 
vainly in the New. Antigua has character and 
atmosphere. It is not a commercial ant-hill, but 
a ruined soul. That is one reason why it is dirty 
and uncomfortable and lazy and good-for-noth- 
ing; for these are often part of that unworldly 
gift which we call temperament. 

In the ruins of one of the largest churches the 
Indians hold their market. Fore-court, nave, and 
cloister, all three are filled with colour. There 
is no hubbub and stir, no crying of wares nor 
Italian penny-drama. The women squat on the 
ground with their little store spread out before 
them. They have carried every ounce of it to 
town upon their heads; so that each has a mere 
basketful to offer, and their day's profits are de- 
cidedly por menor. At least half of them bring 
their babies. I never tired of the little round 
dark faces with shining black shoe-button eyes 
that looked out so contentedly from the fold of 
dirty cloth in which they had been slung upon 
their mother's back. Savage babies, having no 
conviction of self-importance, neither play nor 
howl. They are jogged into market (for the 
Indian always trots while on errand) and spend 
the day en papoose, silent and unremonstrative. 

On four sides stand the shattered walls, their 



Antigua 87 

core of red brick laid bare through the broken 
plaster. Where the surface is still good on soffit 
of arch, on impost, or on springing of some fallen 
vault, the arabesques keep their colour and their 
line, reminiscent of Spaniard and of Moor. Over- 
head is the open sunny sky. From here and there 
one catches a glimpse of the peaked hats of the 
volcanoes. What a setting for the blotched and 
huddled colours of the Mayas' petty merchandry! 
Little by little one learns the names and natures 
of all the strange wares; but the first effect is still 
the best, before knowledge has intervened between 
the senses and the imagination, or familiarity has 
dulled the eyes to the medley of shapes and hues. 

On the walls is a stencilled list of the probable 
articles for sale, with the amount of the octroi on 
each — a tax so minute that there is no currency 
to pay it. Every Indian bringing goods to market 
surrenders a coupon to the official at the doorway 
in payment for his right to sell. "From him that 
hath not. . . ." No doubt it is justifiable 
revenue; yet the American visitor emerges from 
such a scene with a feeling of awe for his own 
affluence. 

The Indians are a fascinating people. I have 
always been suspicious and a little impatient of 
the present-day cult of our own vanished red- 
skins. Through the cloud of sentimentality one 



SS The' Land Beyond Mexico 

seems to discern a race unbelievably cruel, savage, 
and shiftless. The present-day Guatemalan na- 
tive has only the last of these characteristics. He 
is not manifestly related by race to the Indians 
of North America, whose high dieek-bones and 
peculiar profile he lacks. Instead the untrained 
observer is sometimes reminded of Japanese peas- 
ant types; and this resemblance is accentuated by 
the rough short skirt, the sleeved blouse, and the 
broad-brimmed hat in which the men are so often 
dressed. At other times the Mayas of the carved 
walls of Palenque and the idols of Copan seem 
to have come to life. 

The Indians still speak their native tongues, 
in which I was tempted to seek instruction until 
I discovered that in Guatemala alone there are 
some twentv dialects. The sound for the most 
part is harsh and guttural, full of tsh and Scottish 
och. At times I thought that its effect could be 
best suggested by saying that it was like AYelsh, 
onlv more so: at other times it seemed a flood of 
whispered gutturals. To hear Indian children 
talking Spanish is to listen to the twittering and 
squeaking of bats. Many of the men know no 
Spanish. To all one's remarks and inquiries these 
invariably shout "No! no!" in a loud and seem- 
inglv terrified tone. 

Western Guatemala, in fact, is not a Spanish, 



Antiffua 89 

but an Indian land. Ninety-five per cent of the 
population is Indian (and to my thinking, if a 
strain of Indian blood is determinative, the other 
five per cent is rather Indian, too). They are a 
silent and incurious folk, dumb beasts of burden 
without greeting for each other as they pass. 
They have few jests among themselves and laugh 
but little. Of course, there are exceptions like the 
whistling landlord of San Carlos Sija (whose ex- 
tensive repertory of cheerful sounds includes no 
recognizable tune) ; but sober hilarity and banter 
are strange to them. They are addicted to the 
terribly strong brandy which is manufactured 
from sugar-cane. On Sunday evening the ap- 
proaches to the villages are thick with reeling or 
fallen figures. One sees with repulsion drunken 
women with children slung on their backs, lurch- 
ing across the road. They will roll about on the 
steep dirty pavings In drunken stupor, or lie all 
night by the roadside In the rain : and the child 
must suffer. 

Such drunkenness, however, is a Dominical ex- 
ception. On their sober week-days they are a 
much more attractive race. The men frequently 
are handsome and the women beautiful. One 
morning I saw an Indian standing in the doorway. 
His brown legs were bare to the loins ; his ragged 
clothes were slung, rather than worn, about his 



90 The Land Beyond Mexico 

shoulders, and there was a barbaric touch of 
colour in the faded brilliance of red and the soiled 
white with which he was festooned. He carried a 
net on his back, and the weight of its pack made 
him stoop. He was holding out some dirty bills 
and making a helpless and wordless appeal to 
someone beyond my sight. Behind his clear hawk- 
like profile there played the strong sunshine of 
early morning; and the doorway, framing him in, 
made still more striking and picturesque that new- 
world silhouette. 

The young girls have fine erect bodies which 
they are not taught to hide nor need to display. 
From carrying all their burdens on their heads, 
they develop a carriage and a poise which, puts 
our northern ways to shame. The men, on the 
other hand, by putting everything on their backs, 
soon develop a slouching and slovenly gait, which 
the women are quick to acquire as soon as they 

have children to carry about. 
******* 

I was eager to ascend Agua, though I knew that 
the season was anything but propitious. Every 
day by noon the cone was under cloud, while the 
afternoon rains made camping difficult. Accord- 
ingly I determined to make the trip in a single 
day, and drove off in the complete darkness of 
four o'clock. In the course of two hours I learned 




FEAST OF THE VIRGIN, GUATEMALA CITY 



Antigua ^l 

much of the patience, goodness, and long-suffer- 
ing of that intangible destiny which we name the 
Center of Gravity. The road was washed-out 
and probably dangerous; but as the driver did 
not seem to mind, it seemed unreasonable for me 
to object. At sunrise we were two thousand feet 
above Antigua on the skirts of the volcano. Here 
stood a wretched hamlet, Santa Maria, and here 
the local despot furnished horse and guide and 
brealcfast and cordiality. 

There is a trail to the summit. In spite of 
occasional obstacles it is excellent going. Half- 
way up I declined to have the blood of even so 
small a thing as a lank and ribbed nag upon my 
soul, and proceeded more rapidly on foot. After 
a few thousand feet of deep tangled woodland, 
the heavier vegetation became discouraged and 
little by little gave way to pine and grass. At 
the top there was only arid and stunted growth. 

The crater was a wild sparse bowl, ringed with 
black and brown cliffs a couple of hundred feet 
high. The volcano had obviously been long ex- 
tinct. The view was the thing. 

The Pacific coastland lay twelve thousand feet 
directly below, a greenish blue sea of vegetation 
merging into a palish blue ocean of water. On 
the other sides were the hills and the volcanoes, — 
Fire, just across the way; Pacaya and the Kettle 



92 The Land Beyond Mexico 

to the East, with the ravishing glint of the sky- 
blue lake of Amatitlan directly underfoot. It was 
an ^Eschylean Prometheus view, — nothing else 
can give the spirit of blown air and sheer height 
and outspread earth and sea. 

Within half an hour the clouds shut me in with 
cold fog and whistling winds, and I was glad to 
descend. I reached Santa Maria in the early 
afternoon and Antigua in time for dinner. It was 
fortunate that I returned so early, as it chanced 
to be the festival of St. James and the town was 
en fete. 

After dinner I followed the crowds to the 
square (which is the only really picturesque thing 
in Guatemala) and there I watched a man in a 
frame of sputtering fuses and exploding fireworks. 
He trotted up and down, followed by the boys 
of the town, who charged the shower of harmless 
sparks and taunted him until some sudden volley 
of squibs and bursting fire-balls put them to flight. 
No doubt you have guessed the tradition: it is 
all that is left of toro and toreadores. 

Central America has such a passion for fire- 
works that even the broad daylight is filled with 
the unsexed and feeble fury of noonday rockets. 
On Sundays the mass-goers are greeted with them 
at the church-doors; the dead are buried to their 
popping; the returning pilgrim has a couple on his 



Antigua 93 

back, to set off when he reaches home. Noise is a 
ritual to primitive minds; and perhaps a rocket- 
flight imparts the same emotion as a church-spire. 
Indians who are too poor to buy bread still have 
their "cohetes." As I write, and as you read, 
there are rockets blowing their heads off in a 
thousand Indian villages between Mexico and 
Panama. And the black buzzards on the house- 
tops are paying not the slightest attention to their 
explosion. 

Often I looked up longingly to the peak of 
Fire ; but I had no tent and in the rainy season I 
could not go without one. So I stayed below and 
contented myself with gazing. I cannot tell you 
what a spectacle he is. After a drenching June 
rain a cloud-belt of unimaginably brilliant white 
will hide all the lower reaches and leave only the 
sunny peak of red against a quilted sky's patch- 
work of white and blue. In the foreground are 
the coffee plantations and eucalyptus alleys with 
the light catching the wet leaves. You may ride 
on through the cool and shadowy plantations 
hardly touched by the sun. Then there will come 
a sudden gap, and you will look out from the 
half-darkness, and there in the sky will be the 
great head of the volcano again. 



4 I he Land Btyond M^rx'wo 

One movmns^s remembering how beautiful h;ui 
been the hike whieh I l\;ui seen from the top of 
Agua. I disturbed Colorada's fattening medita- 
tions and rode up over the shoulder of the vol- 
eano and down on the other side to Amatithm, 
the town on the edge of the lake. 

1 found an inn. No one was interested to know 
who 1 was or what 1 did or whence I came. 1 hey 
tolerated my presence — ^barely that. 1 did not 
mind. Nor did it annoy me that they promised 
fodder for Colorada and brought none. An hour 
later as 1 crossed the town-square, laden with 
com of mv own provisioning, 1 was watched with- 
out surprise, &hame. or resentment. Tt was only 
a symbol of what they were and how they did. 
The courtyard was a wilderness of flowers, like 
Eden after Fve had been forced to give up 
g-ardening. Throughout the inn everything tluit 
might have made for comfort and orderliness was 
turned to squalor and untidiness. Every room 
was like a grandfather's clock run down a genera- 
tion ago. There is always that air about Spanish 
things: they have had a past. 

Weary of the household with its hostile in- 
curiousness, its bad food, its unkempt condition, 

1 went out. The town was no better. Dirty pink 
and blue house-fronts, drink-shops, slovenly little 
stores full of low-grade odds and ends, dirt and 



/Jntigua 95 

decay and Indifference — it was all of a piece. 
Spanish decadence has not even vice to redeem it. 
It is as inactive as a rusted sprinj^ or a roof that 
has fallen in. Woe to the traveller in Spanish 
lands, if his artist-eye loses its sharpness! When 
mere decay has foregone its glamour, when the 
back aches from weeks in the saddle, and the 
stomach is vicious in its complaint of evil food, 
when the air is hot and heavy with rain, a Guate- 
malan town burns on his spirit like a fly in the 
sore of a horse's back. 

I felt that I had endured enough of the 
wretched country. Cursing the streets through 
which I walked, I came out at the town's edge 
upon the grey-blue lake where the steep green 
volcanic slopes ended in a fairyland of trees with 
branches bent over to the mirror of windless 
water; and all my ill-humour went like a dream. 

There is only one true magician in this world, 
one veritable wand of enchantment. There Is no 
formula for the beauty with which she works. 
One can account for formal beauty In a measure, 
the mind can analyse Its symmetries and relations; 
but the beauty of trees and winds and high hills 
and broad sunlight and running streams Is sheer 
magic, working without reason by its mere po- 
tency. And because it Is untamable to logic and 
explication. It Is incommunicable to him who does 



96 The Land Beyond Mexico 

not feel it. A Spanish gentleman to whom I con- 
fided my love of riding the Guatemalan hills 
shrugged his shoulders. "Trees 1" said he. 

A path brought me up to a grassy shoulder 
high above the lake. Beyond, Agua was wreath- 
ing and unwreathing her head with cloud. The 
eastern volcanoes were driven deep with thunder- 
storm. Below was the intricate wonderland of 
trees in steep descent to the water. After all, 
thought I, it was not for the towns that I came 
to Guatemala. 

And when I returned to the village I found that 
I could be as tolerant of its monstrous unworthi- 
ness as the Spanish law is tolerant of beggars and 
the Spanish houses of dirt. 

Next day I rode up to Guatemala City. It was 
as I had feared: the civilisation was too advanced. 
\yithin a week I was off on my travels again, 
headed this time for Salvador. But that shall 
make my next chapter. 



CHAPTER IV 

RIDING TO SALVADOR 

The scene is laid once more in mud and water. 
The only stage-mechanism is rain and thunder. 
The ox-carts go by, their great wheels sunken 
to the hubs, the oxen plunging and wallowing, 
the drivers nearly naked, knee-deep in the morass 
which was a road, prodding the oxen with pointed 
sticks, and shouting to each other, to the oxen, 
to God in heaven. The rain is nearly blinding. 
When the gust pauses, there are only earth banks 
on either side, crowned with the jaundiced leaf 
of the tree called Evil Herb. There is no glimpse 
of the country-side without; only the stretch of 
mud which the oxen have churned and the rain- 
curtained hedge like a line of vegetable soldiery 
to keep the traveller from taking in despair to 
the empty hills. 

The anguish of riding is not easily described. 
There are mud-holes, unavoidable, and stretches 
which seem impassable. At times, with Colorada 
shoulder-deep and very frightened, we plunged 
and strained, only going on because it could not 

97 



98 TJit- Land BcyonJ Mexico 

be Nvorsc than returning. In other places travel 
lapsed to the rainv monotony of Kiphng's ele- 
phants "in the sliKigv squdgy creek." Then came 
renewed thunder and lightning in the hills accom- 
panied by an unbelievable downpour. At any 
rate, one came to know how Augustus felt on that 
wild night of storm in the Pyrenees when the 
lightning struck close to his litter and his bearers 
floundered to their waists in mud. Uhe anecdote 
is imperial, but the experience has little of regal 
dignity. The purpled emperor, if he fared like 
Colorada and me. must have been a pretty sight 
next morning. 1 fclr like Max and ISIoritz just 
emerged from the baker's trough of dough, and 
Colorada must have felt still worse; for she had 
torn off half of a shoe and was rapidly going 
lame. 

''But for to tellen you of his array. 
His hors were goode, but he was nat gay.'' 
It was a day of blank despond without human 
Incident or cheer. 

We find strange solace at such times. What 
Colorada may have found lies beyond mere 
human intuition. For myself, I have long ago 
forgotten the watery misery of body, yet I re- 
member still the buzzards on the house-tops as I 
left Guatemala Cit^^ in the early morning and 
the singing and flitting of brown and grey-green 



Riding to Salvador 99 

birds among the lush woodland in the later after- 
noon. Like the long-winged sun-disks over an- 
cient Egyptian doorways, the buzzards were hold- 
ing out their pointed wings for the rising sun to 
dry. They were like the cranes in Haufli's mar- 
vellous fairy-tale. It was the same spirit of bird- 
solemnity touched for the spectator with gro- 
tesquencss and pathos and set by some eery 
fashion in a frame of ritual and magic. Great 
and ugly, they stood on the red gables, motionless, 
tip of beautiful wing almost touching tip of wing, 
like priests in mummery, facing the sunrise. As 
I rode on, the misty sun was annihilated in the 
sweep of clouds. But when I had passed the hill- 
ridges and slithered down roads which reversed 
all normal conventions of surface drainage, the 
sun once more illumined my grey and porcine 
career, and as I rode through the wet woods 
the birds came out, sleek and trim and jubilant, 
like the return of happiness after long misfortune. 
And of all that afternoon's countryside I remem- 
ber only that there were occasional great oaks and 
pebbled crossings of shining brooks and, every- 
where about me, bird-song. 

At dusk I made a dirty down-at-the-heels 
pueblo in which a line of African huts gave way 
to a street of adobe shops and a couple of inns. 
That evening in the narrow public room five men 



100 The Land Beyond Mexico 

pounded a pair of marimbas into an unmannerly- 
reverberation of a North-American tune. The 
closed doors were their sounding boards, and I 
their victim, too tired to escape. But it is sweet 
to share misery. Looking up I saw that half a 
dozen little green parrots were perched near the 
ceiling, blinking their eyes, martyred. Anyone 
could see that they were very, very wise, and (like 
most really wise folk) extremely unhappy. And 
that, said I, is like the scorn of omniscient eternity 
for the evil transiency of human art. But as I 
said it in English, the drunken deserter from 
Salvador went on shouting to me that when it 
came to a point of honour a subaltern should not 
hesitate to shoot his superior, and the marimberos 
continued to pound their devil's-anvil, and the 
plagued and sleepy birds on the rafter tried miser- 
ably to doze. 

Through all my journey I was haunted by this 
implied comment of the bird-folk. In filthy court- 
yards walked the teal-like duck which they call 
the pijiji, and always he kept himself so trim and 
tidy amid the immundicity that the contrast ought 
to have penetrated even to those shameless races. 
Down in a Pacific port of the country, on another 
occasion, I watched the pelicans coming home 
along the lagoon. I had left the village in dis- 
gust of its two-storied balconied houses set crazily 



Riding to Salvador lOi 

upon piles on the narrow beach of dark volcanic 
sand. Inland, a row of tumble-down shanties on 
either side of a railroad track had brought the 
sense of a lifetime acquaintance during the heat of 
a single afternoon. A fairly white man in fairly- 
white linen had crossed the track a couple of times 
before I discovered that he had only two steady 
points of call, both alcoholic, and that he was cross- 
ing from one to the other without other pause 
than the consumption of brandy exacted. Each 
trip became more hazardous than the preceding 
one for this human ferry for whom the straight 
line of steel rail must long since have abandoned 
its easy equation of the first degree, to revel in 
asymptotic curves and those more delirious forms 
familiar only to the mathematician and the drunk- 
ard. The end came at last. His foot, striving 
to overstep the elusive metal, found the barrier in- 
surmountable. Soon he was lying on the open 
track in a stupor, his head bare to the blazing sun. 
The Indians passed and saw him with indifference. 
No one helped him, until a white woman found 
him and brought men to the scene. I left in dis- 
gust and sought the uninhabited shore. 

The pelicans were coming home. Their large 
ungainly heads showed clear and sharp against 
the sky-line. They were soaring on their wide 
wings, splendid beautiful fliers, a delight for the 



loa The l^md Beyond Mexico 

bovly-prisoiu\l eye. Low vn cr the surt caiue one, 
sailing without beat ot wing under the snxooth 
curl ot the glassy w.ne and without eAort just 
avoiding the white erash ot' falling water as the 
great wave biwke. And I thought how I had 
but now seen a biped who eould not so much as 
on>ss a railrv^ad-tradv. Clearly the pelicans were 
the best blood in the place. 

With the last ot the birds the sun set behind 
the sea-line. Near by, the great surf under the 
nisted iron pier gradually took on phosphorescent 
lines in its broken depths, the lights shone in the 
cabin of the little freighter at anchor, and the 
stJirs came out. I \\alkevl back to the village. 
It was Siiturday night and everyone was drunk. 

1 thought ot all this through the din of the 
marimbas in Barberena, and the memory of that 
Pacihc evening drove n\e out-ot\loors in the hope 
of that silence which is so much more musical than 
sound* Colorada was still at supper, rhe light 
of a full Guatemalan moon flooded the litterevi 
)^rd. It w^is a time for nighring:iles. But it 
w«s well that there were none, rhe birds al- 
ready had more than proved their superiority; 
and ne^ier had I felt it more keenly than that 
afternoon when the mule and I lin\pevl on our be- 
draggled way, mud-cakevl and heathen, while 
abo\'Te us in the bninches sang the glad clean 



Kid'tfKj to Salvador 103 

feathered folk, liul I daicd nol coniinimicate 
my iiiipicssioiis (o :iiiy one; and as C'olorada 
proved iiulillcnnl to aiiylinn^ cxccj)!: food, I de- 
barred her Irom my receiilly-lormed ealej^ory of 
animals sii})eii()r (o man, and went to bed. 

It was in (liis pari of the hind lliat I eneounler- 
etl a C()llee-[)hinler vvltose Spanish prochiimed hiiri 
a fcUow-Jcountryman of mine. Acquaintance 
turned to mutual likiiiju;^, liking to hos|)itality, and 
hospitality to a three days' visit. We turned off 
from the Salvailor highway and soon were riding 
through the dark solitude of evenly |)Ianted coffee- 
bushes. This plantation, said fny new friend, be- 
longed to a Belgian; and we would drop in on him, 
as our path letl past his door. 

There soon appeared a wooden house with 
broad verandahs and a general look of unkempt 
habitability. At the uproar of the dogs, the 
planter emerged, uncoateil, voluble. We should 
stop, we should open a bottle of wine, we should 
have music. Red-faced and well-stomached, he 
poured forth his im-Parisian b rench like tiie gush 
of an oil-well newly liberated, lie dragged us 
off our animals, and laughed at all we said. 
Schumann's Merry b'armer played with bouncing 
gusto would have been his musical embodiment. 
An hour later I knew, that his wine was excru- 



104 The Land Beyond Mexico 

ciatingly sour, that his phonograph records were 
scratched and out of tune, that his house was in 
confusion, that his table-cloth was as coffee- 
stained as his shirt-front, that his house needed 
paint and his verandah repair, that his anecdotes 
were stupid and his gesticulations silly; but when 
I knew all that, I had been riding for half an 
hour, Belgian and finca had been left behind, and 
the whirl of chuckling riotous farewell had soften- 
ed into the solitude of the dark bushes of berry- 
laden coffee. Dionysos never wrought more il- 
lusion out of pine-stick and ivy-spray and goat- 
skin sack than that Belgian whirlwind blowing 
amid his bottles of acid wine and disks of sour 
music. 

"He's always like that," said my new friend. 
"My stomach is nearly ruined from having to pass 
this way." 

H^ * Hi Hj iK * * 

Colorada was freed, to rest her strained and 
shoeless leg. In perfect happiness she roamed an 
unscythed field; and seeing her, I could not help 
thinking of the great elder-tree with its flowers 
in Swinburne's poem, and of 

"The ripe tall grass, and one that walked 
therein, 

Naked, with hair shed over to the knee." 
In the morning my friend loaned me a horse and 



Riding to Salvador 105 

we started out to make an overseer's round. I 
called to Colorada as we rode by. Her long 
ears forward, she whinnied. Then, as intent as 
a mistress who sees her lover with another 
woman, she regarded me and my new mount in 
puzzled silence, until at last the fragrant grass at 
her feet recalled her to less speculative activities. 
I resent the sentimental ascription of human emo- 
tions to animals and I have no conviction that 
Colorada experienced any feelings during that 
tragic encounter: I confine my chronicle to her 
indubitable stare. 

My friend complained much of the shiftless 
natives and their lazy unambitious ways. Still, 
after twenty years of it, the country jangled his 
nerves. We sought out a half-breed's cabin 
where a woman came to the door at our call. 
Her man, she said, had gone to Guatemala City 
to be cured. 

"Yesterday," said my friend, the overseer, 
"you said he was too sick to leave his bed. How 
then could he walk forty miles to-day?" 

To this there was no repartee; but "indeed, he 
had gone!" 

"You tell him," said my friend, "that I am 
tired of his nonsense, and that as soon as he gets 
that matter of the boat fixed up he is to get to 
work again." 



io6 The- I.iitiJ Beyond Mexico 

"les, sir," said the woman, at once admitting 
the point, "he is down attending to it now. I 
will tell him when he gets back." 

\\ e in the North lie stubbornly and resent de- 
tection. In the tropics they desert their lies as 
readily as they abandon their mistresses. ''After 
all," they think, "what docs it matter?" 

So off we rode on our round of the pLintation 
where the natives were hoeing out the weeds and 
banking the irrigation-ridges beneath the heavy 
shadow of the coftee-bushes. So rapid is the 
growth of weed that a fortnight turns the brown 
s.^ '. .;u.^ a little jungle of undergrowth, and the 
hoe is never still. 

We rode for a couple of hours with occasional 
plunges into great copses and water-cut chasms of 
rioting green. Here and there came a glimpse 
toward the great volcanoes on whom I had turn- 
ed my back. — Fire and Water, and the Kettle, on 
whose slopes my friend had once seen the lava- 
streams blazing at night. 

After a time we came to dirt mounds amid the 
coffee, a cluster of earthen barrows littered with 
numberless fragments of coarse potter)^ and with 
shards and splinters of obsidian knives. Here 
stood a stone some three feet square, carved to the 
likeness of a huge toad, with weatherworn face 
and limbs. Near bv lav the broken head of an 



Riding to Salvador 107 

Idol with good Indian features of the Maya race. 
A hne of beard ran from lower-lip to chin; an 
ornamental scroll variegated his ear. Authority 
and determination were still upon him, though his 
descendants of to-day have neither. 

Prom the soil round about I picked up some 
small terra cottas, a grotesque demon-head mask 
with bird-beak nose, and a head most clearly and 
humorously pithecan. 

When we returned to the plantation-house my 
friend produced an ancient jug of good black clay 
shaped in the guise of a well-fed townsman of 
that old Maya community, caressing with folded 
hands a portliness such as even Falstaff might 
have envied. 

Indian sites are frequent in Guatemala, and 
much minor art is still to find. But the traveller 
needs a measuring-worm's methodical persistence; 
for even when the sites are close at hand he will 
hear of them not at all or by mere accident. Di- 
rect enquiry for them will be in vain, as the natives 
have never noticed them or are too indifferent to 
be bothered with showing the way. Money, it 
must be remembered, is not an effective instrument 
in the Spanish tropics. 

******* 

Regretfully I left the pleasant Idleness of 

plantation life. I was given an Indian servant to 



io8 The Land Bfyond Mexico 

accompany me through the coffee-land back to the 
Salvador road. In the nearest town I presented 
Colorada with a shining set of new shoes and 
waited while she had them put on. It was after- 
noon before 1 got upon my way. and a dreary 
rain soon overtook nie. 

As I passed through the Indian villages, the 
sloping thatch dripped monotonously at the eaves, 
the brown mud splashed underhoot, and the tog 
hung in rainy festoons among the great trees over- 
head. There was no sound but the yapping of 
unfed dogs and the slapping of tortillas, \-;\ried by 
the fragmentary insanities of tame parrots. I 
saw no one. The rainy road led on, and the \nl- 
lage was forgotten. 

By supper-time I reached a town whose length 
of name ill agreed with the shortness of its 
streets. Entirely destroyed by earthquake a few 
years ago, Cuajiniquilapa lost its metropolitan 
headship of the department, its profusion of 
adobe houses, and a church which I should gladly 
haN'e ex;imined. Its dome had dinner-plates bed- 
ded in the mortar vlike some of the churches on 
--Fgean islands, I presume, or the monastery of 
St. Nicholas on the Island of Salamls) . But the 
piece that crowned and closed the domical vault 
was not taken from table-ware, but borrowed 
from that equally useful nocturnal serN-ice which 



Riding to Salvador 109 

it is not decent to name nor wcU-hrcd to insinuate. 
It is ^oin^ too far to assume that even Nature 
was shocked and to exphiln the eartlujuake on 
grounds of her outraged delicacy, — even though 
If is characteristic of man in all ages to elevate the 
paltry misdeeds of his hand or tongue to causes 
for cosmic convulsions, so colossal is the conceit 
of his own accusing conscience! Yet if that is 
indeed the ex|)lanation, I can only regret that 
Nature passed judgment so hastily. J^oes not 
Browning's Pippa enjoin us that 
^^^^ J'All service ranks the same with God?" 

Among the new houses was one where strangers 
could he lodged, and there f revelled in fresh pine- 
apple, whose taste alone repays a journey to the 
tropics. T have spoken little of Guatemalan 
fruits. I'latlng them is apt to he an acquired 
ahility. The flavour of many is as indescrihahle 
as would be a new colour which had no kinsman 
in our spectrum. After all, mangoes taste so 
much like mangoes and so little like anything else 
in the world, that one can only say that they taste 
like mangoes. And if I add that papayas are 
very good if you happen to like them, T am only 
wasting a slice of printer's pie. But of pine- 
apples all may judge by imagining the substitution 
of a warmly ripe and drippingly luscious fruit for 
that faintly flavoured pulp which we buy in our 



110 77/ c- /.(///(/ Bc-yothl Mexico 

northern markets, deluded by its barbarle ex- 
terior Into the expeetation of a pleasant dessert. 

The house ran with dogs, niiseellaneous in their 
pedigree. 1 eNei\ suspected an ori\ithie strain 
when 1 saw them begin to roost tor the night. 
At dusk one took to a high bench; another slept 
on tlie dining-room table, to which he correctly 
ascended by Nvay ot a chair: while a third climbed 
with the utmost nonchalance and a considerable 
ciisplay of skill into the low-swung hammock, 
^Yhen. on retiring. 1 left the door ajar the cat 
came to share my rest and a tourth dog occupied 
the bed against the other wall. 'No doubt,' 
thought 1. 'attentive observation of the "smale 
fowles*' sa\es them trom rheumatism!' 

I woke in the middle of the night to find that 
the rain had invaded the room and that the floor 
was well under water. Outside, the moon was 
struggling through the clouds. It was a scene 
whose rippling beauty was marred only by the 
unesthetic reminiscence that I had left my shoes 
in the path of inundation. Fhe next morning the 
dog was still snoozing drilv in his hammock and 
the water had disappeared. But the shoes bore 
witness that mv vision was not the mere disorder 
of my dreams. 

Colorada seemed ready for a day's work. So 
I saddled her in the sunrise and rode down a 



Riding to Salvador • III 

long descent to the River of the Slaves, whose 
boulder-strcwn flood of roaring dirty water is 
crossed by what may well be the oldest bridge in 
our western world. For it was built in 1589, and 
there are few things on our side of the Atlantic 
which can number a third of a thousand years. 
Some of the stones are new; but others may well 
be as old as the tablet on the crown of the span 
insists. 

For a time the path led up the sandy river- 
valley, splashing among clear puddles and crossing 
little woodland streams, until the scenery lost its 
good-natured tranquillity and swung into the 
savage reaches of deserted hills. With the path 
winding up and up in the burning sun, it was long 
before the last of the valley was left behind. 
Looking back over the ragged tree-land, forty 
miles away I saw the familiar sugar-loaf hats of 
the great volcanoes and waved good-bye to them. 
As I crossed into the new watershed they vanish- 
ed, and I came to the village of Azacualpa. 

This was by origin a Spanish penal colony, and 
had an appropriately evil repute through all the 
country-side. In Azacualpa they would steal the 
tail off the mule while you were riding through. 
From every hand I had been warned to waste no 
time in that robber's nest. So I was dutifully 
shuddering and riding on, when such a burst of 



112 The Land Beyond Mexico 

thunderstorm overtook me that, to escape it, I 
would cheerfully have turned aside to play Faro 
with Captain Flint. Naturally, I found the 
people simple and kind and pleasant. The 
soldiers were willing to talk; the women insisted 
on feeding me eggs and bread and coffee. Even 
the dogs were friendly. Colorada, too, thought 
highly of the community, and I would have spent 
the night there ; but hearing of a larger town some 
ten miles further on, I set out again in a heavy fog 
which failed to lift. I must have made poor 
progress ; for when I slipped below the cloud-line 
into an open valley-basin it was sunset. Dusk 
came on in the uninhabited fields. Then came 
darkness and rain and I abandoned the helm to 
the four feet of a surer navigator than myself. 
For having left the high road in the hope that a 
short-cut would bring me to Quesada in time, my 
only reward was now the dim form of an un- 
meaning hedge close at hand and the provoking 
distant twinkle of an unknown light. It was the 
first and last time that darkness was to catch me 
on the road. 

Left to her own mulish devices Colorada 
gratefully lapsed into that speed whose ideal she 
shared with tortoises and snails. Lights appear- 
ed, sudden as cloud-uncovered stars, and they 
were close at hand. Then came a turn, a sharp 



Riding to Salvador 113 

descent, and the black rush of a bridgeless river ; 
and all the lights had vanished. Poor Colorada 
was unanimously in favour of remaining on the 
hither shore, until my spurs overruled her last ob- 
jections and she waded out into the invisible swirl- 
ing current. By good luck the stream was 
swifter than it was deep and we struck the notch 
in the opposite bank where the road continued. 
In five minutes more we were in the town; and 
soon Colorada was eating a lampless dinner of 
corn-stalks in the Municipal Stables, while I, 
supperless and a trifle wet from the river, slept 
in my clothes on the bench of the Court of 
Justice. 

I awoke in the black hours of the night to dis- 
cover that somebody was trying to saddle a mule 
in the middle of the floor. When he had finished, 
he roused the roomful of Indian constabulary for 
fear that they had failed to become aware of his 
departure, shook hands with each and every one 
of them, then climbed on his mule and rode 
through the doorway into the pelting rain. 
Torches were extinguished, candles blown out, 
and sleep resumed, when the night-watch entered, 
announced that it was raining too hard for mili- 
tary service, and began an endless conversation 
in the course of which I fell asleep once more and 
missed all but the last part of their narrative. 



114 The Land Beyond Mexico 

This I woke to hear at a time when a grey light 
was breaking through the chinks of the wall, 
gradually transforming the shapeless bundles on 
the floor to brown bare legs and snoring bodies 
of half-breed Indians. 

In the unexaggerating light of a breakfastless 
dawn the Municipal Stables looked astonishingly 
like an ordinary dirty back-yard and the Courts of 
Justice like a small unfurnished room with brick- 
tile floors and drab walls. However, as my 
hotel-bill was four cents American, it would be 
worse than ungrateful for me to spoil the illusion 
of those stately names. 

Would no one give me coffee? Perhaps the 
Chinaman who kept the store around the corner, 
or even the Frenchman across the square. The 
square had some of the geometric properties ap- 
propriate to that figure, but was otherwise in- 
distinguishable: the Frenchman was in bed. I 
made a discourse on the traditional friendship of 
our two countries and ordered his native wife to 
prepare me some coffee. The sun came up In bar- 
baric splendor, the coffee was hot, and the French- 
man sent a message from between the blankets, 
to the effect that he had always esteemed my 
country highly and that the price would be ten 
cents. While I was paying, a dishevelled woman 
came over the hill-top of the square like a blown 




IDOLS OF COPAN, HONDURAS 



Riding to Salvador^ 1 15 

bush before a tornado. She made for the sol- 
diery, by whom she was instantly enveloped. Like 
flails on a threshing floor, her arms waved above 
the encompassing crowd. She was in tears and 
in anger. May classic Castile forgive her the 
jargon she was talking! I understood not a 
single word, and the soldiers would not tell me 
what she said. But they pacified her; and she 
withdrew like a burned-out meteor from my 
horizon. 

It was time to start. So I saddled Colorada 
and, after replying to usual enquiries by an un- 
usually clear explanation of a New York office- 
building and a rough comparison of the popula- 
tion of that city and Quesada, I rode off through 
the fields thankful that I had crossed the river on 
the previous evening ahead of the heavy rain. 

I had only a short ride before me. It was- Sun- 
day, dedicate to God and brandy, a bad day for 
extensive travel. Wherefore I was content to 
reach Jutiapa before noon and to rest. 

As I entered the town a bare-foot and un-uni- 
formed soldiery was returning from rifle-practice. 
Before them, like a wounded comrade upon a 
stretcher, the painted figure of a wooden man was 
being carried back In triumph to the dis-stralns of 
a band. Set up against the bleak hillside, he had 
been the wretched scapegoat of his tribe. Now 



ii6 The Land Beyond Mexico 

even in death his bland face was drawn to an ar- 
chaic smile, his vapid eyes stared patiently to- 
ward heaven. Poor bullet-ridden eidolon ! Did 
the rifles really tremble less and the bullets go 
straighter because that ragged soldiery felt the 
thrill of his illusion and almost could make itself 
believe in him as a thing of blood and bone? And 
what greyest remnant of savage Baldur or Adonis 
was there in that processional carrying-home of 
the god whom they had slain? Was there none 
at all, just because they were themselves aware of 
none? 

It was the feast of St. Christopher. From the 
white-washed church came a strange procession. 
Two boys in brilliant carmine led the way with 
cross and candlestick. Behind them strode ten 
knights, fresh from the fairyland of an im- 
promptu pantomime. Their stockings were for- 
get-me-not pink-and-blue. Cloth-of-gold at a 
penny a yard made brave work of their uppers. 
Their heads wore pointed magician-hats set with 
tiny flashing mirrors. A drum and one fife made 
music, a sort of Farmer Helvig's Spring-dance, 
whose crudely accentuated beat always seemed 
(but was not) out of rhythm. The ten rem- 
nants of chivalry danced with crossing of brown 
feet and of wooden swords. Behind came an 
armful of rockets, whose feeble skyward rush was 



Riding to Salvador 117 

meant to enliven every halt. Then came two 
festival floats, set-pieces of wire-frame and colour- 
ed paper, mounted on kitchen tables whose un- 
romantic limbs were buried in artificial flowers 
such as even the fertile jungle-lands could never 
have evolved. The superstructures delved in 
that realm of childish splendor dear to the 
southern Roman Catholic and the country- 
kitchens of our chromolithographic North. One 
showed St. Christopher with pretty Christchild 
on his shoulders, fording through gigantic bego- 
nias. The other was a waxen saint with girlish 
mien and dresses. Pink and blue flowers made 
her paradise and supported her enthusiastic motto, 
"Long live St. Christopher!" She was carried 
by Indian women, and a little girl walked beneath 
the table, as though under a flowering canopy. 
The rockets blew themselves to smoky bits, the 
fife whistled and wheezed, the swords clashed in 
wooden fervor as the mimers danced their stately 
step. It was a real festival, and St. Christopher 
could not have helped being pleased. 

In the inn doorway I found a demure little 
three-year-old, sitting stark-naked on the thresh- 
hold and dipping his fingers into a large plate of 
black-bean mush. Some vague reminiscence of 
Sartor Resartus suggested the young Carlyle with 
his plate of porridge, and the confusion of the 



Ii8 The Land Beyond Mexico 

two pictures was so ludicrous that the little fellow 
looked up with a puzzled friendly face to see why 
the stranger was laughing. On the walls of the 
room behind him were some frescoes clearly be- 
longing to the undiscovered school of Guatemalan 
Primitives, and to these I diverted my amuse- 
ment. But the woman of the house saw only 
that I had laughed at her child and her paintings, 
and I had to abandon my intellectualised perver- 
sions to make my peace with the real world of 
human things. There seems to be nothing so 
ubiquitously rude as a laugh unshared or a smile 
not understood. The grave unsmiling savage is 
well on his way toward being a gentleman; and a 
sense of the ludicrous is the root of ill-breeding. 

Next day before sunrise I started on the last 
stretch of my journey. The Indians were coming 
to market, stringing out across the almost treeless 
plain. All had the one question, — "How is the 
river?" I had crossed it with my feet tucked up 
on Colorada's neck and having managed to keep 
dry could not help being optimistic. Yet It must 
have been no small matter for the old women with 
their heavy baskets on their heads to wade 
through the swirl of the rain-swollen stream. 
But If I lied to them, I lied as the Spaniards often 
do, out of kindness and a desire to please; and 



Riding to Salvador 119 

for that, I hope they left the stranger's memory 
uncursed when they stepped "down to the foam 
and muddy roar of their dreaded Tamasulapa. 

It was a countryside such as meets one every- 
where in Greece, — a stony grey-green plain shut 
in by unforested hills with a merciless splendor of 
light to make its barrenness attractive. In the 
dry season the brown earth must split open in 
numberless cracks and the dust lie like a desert- 
mantle on every leaf and twig. But in rainy 
August it was almost verdant. The air was 
fresh and cool, and the mist travelled along the 
hill-tops with shadowy promise of further down- 
pour. 

It was a long and steep ascent, past some fan- 
tastic rock-castles of century-long erosion not un- 
like those natural towers on which the Thessalian 
monks built their unapproachable monasteries). 
At the top of the ridge there were trees once more 
and glimpses backward over the wide reaches of 
upland plain and lowland jungle. Then came a- 
delightful woodland way, level and wind-blown, 
and a zigzag plunge from the far-seeing ridge 
down to a town buried like an English village in 
the shadow of immemorial trees. 

I found a girl standing in an open doorway, 
and persuaded her to take pity on my hunger. 
Though I had nothing devised upon my banner, 



I20 The Land Beyond Mexico 

my apprehension of the shades of night and my 
eagerness to be gone reduced our behavior to the 
inanity of the poem. What wonder that when 
the maiden actually uttered her "Oh, stay, and 
rest," I was terribly embarrassed lest my bright 
blue eye should continue the romantic tradition? 
However, we fell to arguing, myself insisting that 
I must cross the frontier before nightfall and she 
maintaining that it was not possible to ride twenty- 
five miles that afternoon. She was wrong in that, 
and I should have proved her so, had it not been 
that a black storm came over the hill-tops at three 
o'clock and blustered me into putting up for the 
night in the shabbiest little border-village that ever 
crept upon a map. I translated my passport with 
appropriate grandiloquence to the commandant of 
the lounging barefoot soldiery and received his 
permission to do what I liked. I soon found 
that this was an inexpensive generosity, and that 
the sheik had presented me with the freedom of 
the desert. My dinner was the eternal triad, — 
black beans, tortillas, and coffee. My bed was 
an unyoked ox-cart in the village square. Two 
wandering Indians whom I had overtaken and left 
behind in the early afternoon arrived at nightfall, 
and, building a tiny fire beside me, cooked a pinch 
of coffee in a little tin from their pack. From 
the same source appeared cold tortillas to be 



Riding to Salvador 121 

toasted on sticks. When the little blaze had 
smouldered and died, they rolled up in their 
blankets and slept on the ground. Food and 
sleep were to them an emotionless ritual, per- 
formed with the silent vast intensity of the pyra- 
mids of Gizeh. Beneath my cart a sow took 
quarter for the night until I disputed with her the 
justness of her assumed prerogative of using my 
bed for a scratching-post. One cannot sleep 
through quakes, be they volcanic or merely suil- 
line. 

It was a night of brilliant stars. In the half- 
illumination of the midnight sky the black cone 
of Chingo stood above me, fit staging for a phan- 
tom play. The warm air was vaguely sweet 
with tropic perfume. To drift off into slumber 
in such a world was a touch of Elysian content. 

Was it not a retired seaman who gave orders 
to be roused in the early morning with the mes- 
sage that the admiral desired his presence? So 
much more did he relish his protracted slumber 
when after his invariable "Tell the admiral to go 
to Hell," he sank back between the covers! I 
had the same delicious sense of slumbering off a 
dozen times into the tropic night, only to be 
snatched back into the unpleasantness of the con- 
scious world. For a dozen people passed along 
the road from the frontier. The dogs barked, 



122 The Land Beyond Mexico 

iirst in the distance, then close at hand. Finally 
a black shadow stole across the open. Thereat 
a soldier, idling under cover at the opposite side 
of the square, emitted a bawl that must have been 
audible half a mile away. The bamboos heard it, 
the prowlers drinking at the midnight stream 
heard it, the great trees tried to stifle it, the hill- 
cliffs re-echoed it: how much more did I on my ox- 
cart and Colorada at her hitching-post suffer from 
that interminable sentence which involved inter, 
alia an exhortation not to go further, a command 
to traverse the square, and an intimation that the 
commandant's representative would be interested 
in inspecting the traveller's papers! ... all be- 
cause a soldier was too lazv to cross the square 
and stand guard on the road-side. 

I was content to leave before dawn and to con- 
tinue down the narrow stream which had brought 
me out of the highlands. In and out of its bed 
we splashed. "And when you have crossed it the 
third time," had said the owner of my night's 
lodging-place, "you will be in Salvador." It was 
like the brooks in Looking-glass Land, where an 
action apparently quite trivial and irrelevant was 

followed by momentous consequences. . . . 
******* 

So I was in Salvador! And this was no longer 
Guatemala, this rocky path and washed-out track, 



Riding to Salvador 123 

or this familiar mud through which we flounder- 
ed ! Yet It looked the same for a while. But at 
length I came out on green treeless hillocks, dead 
volcanoes clothed in emerald, so smooth of slope 
that one could wish to see a gigantic hand reach 
out to stroke that shimmering velvet. It is an 
effect peculiar to volcanic regions. The Alban 
hills near Rome have a little of It; and there Is a 
hint of it around Naples. But Italy is too dry 
and arid to give those slopes their proper green. 
In Salvador It makes an unending pastoral tran- 
quillity. I knew Indeed that I was In another 
land. 

By eleven in the morning I had ridden twenty- 
five miles despite of some of the most distress- 
ing mud that Colorada's flanks had yet encounter- 
ed; and I was back once more among streets and 
houses, where there were people who had seen 
London and Paris, who knew that Europe had 
been at war and could feel the pity of It. For the 
first time, Colorada lived in a real hotel and was 
waited on by other menials than her master. The 
town was Santa Ana, and there for the first time 
In many weeks I looked on the face of someone 
whom I could call a friend, a fellow-being In the 
same ancient Aryan civilisation in which mules 
and Mayas have no share. 



CHAPTER V 

DON QUIXOTE'S RANCH 

It is only another Instance of man's inveter- 
ate self-complacency that he cheats the powers of 
darkness by claiming rest for Paradise and yet 
calling unrest divine. For my own part, in Sal- 
vador I was more inclined to credit Satan with 
the invention of both; for while I thought that 
travel was diabolic, I found inactivity to be the 
very devil. Colorada fattened in her stall, as 
though her indifferent ears heard no far blowing 
of mountain-winds and singing of w^oodland birds. 
For hers was a wooden and unregenerate soul; 
and I have little doubt that in her next incarna- 
tion she will be a fencepost. But to me the days 
brought only uneasiness. Beyond the town roofs 
I could see the hills, and I would think of the 
rocks and woods where ran the trails — places of 
birds and shadows and hilltop views. One after- 
noon suddenly I saddled Colorada and rode away. 

Heading north on the highroad, we came near 
sunset to a village without an inn. In the local 
providence there was no provision for strangers; 

124 



Don Quixote's Ranch 125 

but I found an old couple who were willing to re- 
ceive that ill-assorted pair of fellow-travellers, an 
American man and a Guatemalan mule. Of the 
two, the American was the better-bred; for the 
Guatemalan broke at midnight from her tether 
and allayed her curiosity with an inspection of the 
town. I guarantee that she found nothing to re- 
ward her ambulations and that I learned as much 
as she by lying on a cot and listening to two old 
men mourn for the golden past. 

"What young man is there to-day," said one, 
"to whom you could point as representing the old 
manhood of Teixistepeque? Not one!" 

"It is all gone," said the other, "morality, hon- 
esty, industry ! The young men — what are they? 
Shiftless, unthinking, good-for-nothing." 

"It did not use to be so," said the former. 
"Teixistepeque in our day — that was a village! 
A bit of the true Salvador, the free Salvador! 
The world is growing evil." 

"Yes, the world is growing evil. The men of 
to-day . . ." 

The old illusion! 

I was tempted to tell them what their next sen- 
tence was to be. (It is all written out in Greek 
and Latin books of two thousand years ago.) 
But the prophecy would have failed; for a young 
boy and a girl entered the house at that moment, 



126 The Land Beyond Mexico 

and the cheerfulness of youth cut short the grey- 
beards' threnody. The whole party fell to telling 
marvellous fables, amid whose unimaginative and 
preposterous involutions my sleepy senses soon 
lost themselves, to slip from a candle-lit peasant- 
room into a blessed land void of Spanish words or 
Indians or twelve-league rides to dirty towns. 
But at daybreak I woke to all of these. 

The old man went to his work in the fields 
in the cold mist of sunless glimmer and the old 
woman made me coffee. I saddled Colorada and 
set out. From a cool and sleepy road of trees 
the path emerged into the open among volcanic 
mounds and grassy cones. Grazing horses stood 
out like phantom mares on the strangely peaked 
sky-Hne above. The ride promised to be interest- 
ing. But volcanoes and horses were left behind, 
the air lost its morning freshness, and the path 
led for hours through hot open country. Except 
for occasional strings of mules, heavy-laden and 
despondent, coming down to Santa Ana from the 
mines of the hill-country beyond, there was nothing 
of interest except a great lake whose windless 
silver stretched off to the low ranges of the Guate- 
malan frontier. Then came the roaring of a 
river, which Colorada heeded less than I. Little 
did she know in her mulish innocence that the river 
which she had twice crossed at Jutiapa on her way 




THE THICKET, QUIRIGUA 



Don: Quixote's Ranch 127 

to Salvador had swung north to intercept her once 
again, swollen now by all the streams of the 
Jalapa highlands. Mules do not cross rivers 
until they come to them (nor always even then), 
and I envied Colorada's indifference to the roar 
of the white rapids beside which we rode. In the 
end there was (as though by miracle) a bridge of 
solid stone, luxury undreamed, deus ex machina to 
our little difficulties. 

On the other side of the bridge the road at once 
entered deep forest filled with tropical growth and 
life. The path was a-flutter with brilliant butter- 
flies, and there were lizards galore and new kinds 
of birds. Colorada, the unsesthetic, noticed only 
that she had become the sudden prey of huge flies 
which I slaughtered assiduously on her bleeding 
neck and flanks. But the swarms, like all else, 
passed, and we emerged from the deep wonder- 
land to catch sight of the broken cone of an old 
volcano and a succession of sunken lakes, dead 
craters rain-filled and edged with trees. Beyond 
a larger lake we shortly came to the town of 
Metapan, and there I lunched, and idled away the 
remnants of the hot and radiant afternoon. 

When I stole out in the grey dawn, next morn- 
ing, I left the inn unobserved and unspeeded; but 
Colorada, unsusceptible to furtive as to other 
emotions, transformed tip-toeing to a clatter of 



128 The Land Beyond Mexico 

hoofs upon the deserted streets. In the \-illag:e 
square a dreamy sentinel blinked at me without 
comment; the dock in a square tower (built 
placidly in front of the ver\' center of the church- 
door) struck the half-hour: a lonely figure dodged 
across the streets ahead of me and slipped like a 
shadow through a dark doorway. Mist swam in 
the leaves of the great trees and blurred the red 
ridges of the roofs. There was no wind and 
little light. The town seemed a graveyard. But 
Colorada, being void of apprehensions, communi- 
cated her indifference to me. Without haste we 
passed out into a countryside of dripping thickets. 
A misty range of eastern mountains flanked us 
like a wall, over which there shortly appeared the 
red face of the sun. Across these ridges lay my 
day's journey: but as the crests seemed more than 
three thousand feet above. I had little hope of 
riding the needful forty miles through that 
bristliag land. An arch Ionian pessimist once 
hailed Thasos with much the same despair. — 

"Like a donkey's spine it stands 

Abristle with savage wood." 

4: sic :i( 4: « * 4c 

I have never seen a desert-mirage, that shifting 
dty of pinnacles and minarets whose margin 
fades : but I have learned to appredate the baffled 
temper of the caravans. Riding for Esquipulas. 



Don Quixote's Ranch 129 

I interrogated man, woman, and child, always 
with the one question of distance yet to go. I 
felt toward their answers as the Hellenes to the 
Thracian tongue: " 'Tis the chitter of swallows," 
said those good-natured and contemptuous speak- 
ers of Greek. And chitter of swallows might 
have been those answers along the road. 

"It is ninety miles," said one, "and you will be 
there tc-morrow night." 

"Over those hills," said another, "and then it 
is only a short piece to ride." 

At times I was a dozen leagues from my goal, 
only to hear of it floating behind the nearest 
woods. Toward noon I became interested in the 
town of Concepcion. When it actually came into 
view among the trees, a real human village shut 
in with the homely sound of running water, I felt 
that I had performed as impossible a feat as 
though I had stumbled upon the rainbow's pot-of- 
gold. Pot-of-earth, it seemed, there was none; 
for I could find nothing cooking on the hearths 
of the villagers, and rode on in my chimeric 
search for Esquipulas. It was a district of mines, 
upland ventures of foreign capital scarring the 
hills with the marks of that one quest which all 
mankind can understand. I had expected to run 
into countr^Tnen of my own ; but the mines lay off 
the main track and my day's goal was nebulous 



130 The Land Beyond Mexico 

still. On those high hills of the gods, the shirt- 
sleeved young engineers curse the tropics and 
their loneliness, reviling the shiftless race whose 
labor will not serve. Not for them are the great 
shadows above clear streams in those wild valleys, 
the broken falls of sheer earth above them, and 
from colored ridges the far views toward volcano- 
crowned horizons. God, it seems, made the world 
to be lived in, not to be looked at. So the Indians 
sweat or lie indolent; the white men drink away 
the damnable solitude ; the trees and flowers grow 
and die under blowing winds and falling rains; 
and only the sentimental journeyers delude them- 
selves with empty contemplation. 

It was late afternoon. From water-eaten 
ridges I slid Into a new valley and rode out on a 
high tongue of land. To right and left the 
ground fell away Into deepening gullies that led 
to the broad green valley-plain beyond; but my 
path kept level as though on an earth-built cause- 
way Into space. In all the land beneath, there 
was no town. Esquipulas, the Mecca of New 
Spain, seemed as elusive amid these hills as ever 
the Grail-castle was to the questing knights. I 
wondered what I had come to see, whether the 
Black Christ and the shining towers were not a 
new-world phantasy of pious minds ; and while I 
wondered, suddenly there was the town at my 



Don Quixote's Ranch 131 

feet, red rambling roofs in a long straight line and 
the yellow dome and white walls of a great church, 
conspicuous and splendid, like the clustered build- 
ings of a lonely lighthouse In the grey-purple 
sea of waning day. 

The artist chooses at pleasure from the world 
of his experience, wise in his eliminations. If 
only Memory were an artist, too! Our past 
might be hke a pleasant landscape; our friends, 
portraits; our disillusions dropped from the can- 
vas. Then Esquipulas would have been only that 
company of red roofs marching to a white-tower- 
ed temple, toward which I descended in a sheer 
plunge from a sunset ridge into the gathering 
dusk of the valley-floor. But the spirit of re- 
membrance is a cross-grained and malicious demon 
with httle sense of form, content to jumble to- 
gether all the arbitrary and distorted elements 
which he chooses to find significant. Esquipulas, 
thanks to that Mephistophelian spirit, is for me 
a futurist composition, wherein are thrown inter 
alia an earnest woman, pineapples, a red tin-flag 
In front of a butcher-shop, the cracked keystone of 
a bridge, five naked children sitting in the gutter, 
an open bake-oven glowing and crackling, an In- 
dian spitting, five brandy-booths, an enormous 
armful of mule-fodder, a raw egg without cup or 
spoon, and a row of nettles waving In the moon- 



132 The Land Beyond Mexico 

light. And what can a writer do w^ith such a 
memory, or such a world? 
******* 

There was no inn in Esquipulas. By advice of 
the soldiery 1 begged for quarters from a pious 
widow, and was given stable-room for Colorada 
and not unsimilar lodging for myself. Walls, a 
ceiling, a floor; these the room had. But I felt 
that it had acquired those members e definitione 
rather than by any active interest of its own. 
Luckily there was a cot available. Food there 
was none for man or beast; but I soon came back 
somewhat as IVlacduft's soldiery from Burnham 
wood, looking like a moving corn-field of green 
stalks. For my own consolation I ended up in the 
back of a wretched brandy-shop where I ate black- 
beans and tortillas by shifting candlelight in a 
sooty bake-room which might have been a char- 
coal-burner's dream of the Inferno. There I was 
pestered by the sore-eared carcass of a dog more 
hungry even than myself, and annoyed by the 
proximity of women whose clothes seemed to be 
rotting on their backs. Nor is the picture over- 
drawn. 

On my return to the house the widow was 
waiting. 

"One question," said she. 

And when I had expressed my readiness, "I 



Don Quixote's Ranch 133 

am religious," she said; "but what about you?" 
Now, I never answer that question very bril- 
Hantly. Perhaps I suspect it of belligerency. I 
hold that it should be marked "Beware of the 
Badger!" However, that evening I was re- 
ligious too ; and all went well until, in an un- 
guarded moment, I admitted my Protestantism. 
Then came storm. For half an hour I swallowed 
dogma, denied heresy, and acclaimed all the saints 
in general, but most especially Our Lord of 
Esquipulas, for whom I evolved a considerable 
enthusiasm. When a man has ridden a mule 
close on fifty miles he may be permitted a con- 
version to Baal or Moloch if they be masters of 
his bed and blankets. (Primitive religion is 
rather of that sort anyway, and a tired man is 
apt to be primitive.) 

Mollified, but only half content, the local 
champion of Catholicism allowed me to remain 
beneath her roof. But the ordeal continued, as 
she proceeded to be religious in a neighboring 
room and Involved the rest of her household In 
song. Now, It is a strange thing that we forgive 
Nature for being out of pitch, but not mankind. 
A flatted piety brings only its author nearer God. 
The civilized world must have its religion and its 
esthetics concordant; and it is generally only 
serving-maids and men-of-business who can fall 



134 The Land Beyond Mexico 

victim to the unsensitive tactics of revivalism. 
But I was patient. Next morning the widow 
came again, to announce that I could not remain, 
since her house was for Catholics and not for 
heretics. 

I was tired of the whole dispute. 

"One question," said I, and like herself on the 
previous evening proceeded to ask a nufnber. 

"Have you been to Rome where the pilgrims 
go ? No ? / have been to Rome. 

"Have you seen the great church where the 
Pope lives? No? / have seen that church. 

"Have you seen the Pope, God's vicar here on 
earth? No? / have seen God's vicar. 

"I am a holy man," I said; and left her. 

When I returned an hour later, I found that a 
chair had been added to the furnishings of my 
room. 

Mecca of Spanish America, shrine of the black 
image of Christ, town of the January pilgrims 
encamped around the white walls and yellow 
dome of a great and solitary church, — small won- 
der that I was eager to come there and to see it 
with my own eyes. In the daylight I found half 
a mile of straight street, lined with low houses of 
stuccoed mud. Three squatting Indians were sell- 
ing pineapples. They named their price in silver 



Don Quixote's Ranch 135 

of Salvador, I agreed In currency of Guatemala, 
and paid them with Honduranian coin, leaving 
the three of them in helpless dispute. The first 
maintained that I had cheated them, the second 
that they had cheated me, the third that neither 
had cheated the other. (This last was clearly a 
pessimist confirmed.) But as they had dedicated 
their lives to reconciling these three currencies, I 
felt that an outsider could teach them nothing, 
clutched my pineapples, and went to explore the 
church. There it stood, white and high at the 
end of the vista of straight street and dirty 
house-fronts, with a tower-flanked fagade whose 
receding stages recalled the peaked front of Dutch 
houses in spite of the inevitable classic orders 
and baroque scrolls of the Spanish tradition. The 
four corner-towers themselves in receding stories, 
passed from square through octagon to a tiny 
crowning cupola. In the center was a dome 
covered with lemon-coloured tile. For the rest, 
every inch had been whitewashed with such ardor 
that the saints in their niches were bundled up in 
a dozen coats of paint and looked like dough- 
sculpture floured and ready for the Christmas 
oven. 

Before the entrance was a platform of red 
brick, and there on every tile pious pilgrims had 
scratched the outline of their soles. Large feet 



136 The Land Beyond Mexico 

:\nd small. Initialed or uncommented, they were 
there by the hundreds, footprints of those that 
had stood at the door oi our black Lord oi Esqui- 
pulas. 

I entered, to tind the interior large and bare. 
Whitewashed piers carried the usual barrel-vault 
of the nave. At the crossing the cupola broke the 
dull and heavy ceiling-lines with pierced drum and 
with painted evangelists on the four pendentives. 
The tloor was of red brick tile and innocent of 
bench or chair or any encumbrance of comfort. 
Paintings hung on the piers of the nave and gaudy 
paper flags from the impost-cornice above. 
Along the side walls stretched a line of gilded 
tabernacles for the gentle and highly colored 
waxen saints. The rest was whitewash. 

let when the Indian women knelt on the 
bare floor with their bright shawls across their 
shoulders and beyond them the acolytes in red 
waved the incense, though the dimmest eye would 
have been outraged by the colours and the dullest 
ear by the sounds, there was something in the 
strange blending of emotions to mark and to re- 
member. The sacring-bell rang, an altar-shade 
rolled up. and there behind glass was the Black 
Image, for native eyes so miraculous, so sacro- 
sanct, so mystical, the tremor of whose presence 



Don Quixote's Ranch 137 

ran visibly through the brilliant shawls of the 
kneeling women. Whitewash and tinsel, — tinsel 
and whitewash : yet I am half-ready to believe that 
our Lord of Esquipulas can in truth work his 
miracles there. 

Nevertheless, his fame and his power are 
slowly fading. There is still fiesta from New 
Year's to Mid-January; but the crowds, they say, 
are less, and the great floor no longer seethes with 
worshippers coming and going. In mid-summer 
when I saw it, the long street of houses, beginning 
with its brandy-shops, stretched desolately away 
from the steps of the church. A cynic might 
claim that there was still ample spiritual elation; 
but a handful of drunken go-to-meeting Indians is 
a poor substitute for the festivals that once were 
held when the Black Christ of Esquipulas gathered 
his pilgrims from furthest Mexico and Panama. 

In the course of the day, in a little church, I 
found a legend stencilled on linen, setting forth 
in gruesome detail the anti-Catholic laws in force 
In England "since 1535." Those old religious 
persecutions make sorry reading; but what of a 
priesthood of to-day that uses such means to de- 
fame an opposing creed? No doubt, then, the 
widow was persuaded that I, on my native soil, 
turned my energies to fining, whipping, and 



138 The Land Beyond Mexico 

quartering loyal Catholics; and does It not speak 
for her hospitality that I was not secretly mur- 
dered during the night? 

Murdered, however, I was not ; and next morn- 
ing by candle-light I stumbled upon Colorada 
sleeping on her side. By candle-hght she ate her 
dried corn and by candle-light she was saddled 
and exhorted. I pushed the house-door wide and 
rode Into the empty village-street. The first 
dawn explored the chinks between the paving- 
stones and felt with forlorn fingers for the dirty 
walls of the houses. Outside of the town It was 
not better. Water oozed on the meadows and 
the damp wind blew fog-wlsps In dreary dances. 
But after a time came sunrise ahead over ragged 
hills, bloody and barbaric as blowing trumpets; 
and behind, across the plain, the white towers of 
our Lord of Esqulpulas slowly grew out Into the 
commonplace of day. 

There seemed to be little or no path. Some 
cowherds offered me fresh milk and gave me In- 
structions. For a while a little barefooted half- 
breed trotted along ahead of me, the only guide 
whom I ever persuaded Into my service In Guate- 
mala. There were frequent streams, all moving 
across my way to reach the River Lempa on Its 
southward course through Salvador to the Pacific. 
By mId-mornIng I reached the hills and crossed 



Don Quixote's Ranch 139 

the low watershed of the continent into a wild 
steep valley where all the waters turned to the 
other ocean. Beyond were the blue frontier hills 
of Honduras. 

It was a scene full of unfriendliness. Around 
me were low ridges, bristly and unkempt. The 
path slipped down the steep valley-head in rocky 
zigzags over the stony shelves of pine to the more 
fertile shadows of the bed below. Here and 
there I thought that I could distinguish the thatch 
of a hut; but there was no other sign of life. Of 
birds and beasts there were none. I could look 
down the long valley to the near forests of green 
and the far hills of blue and know that no one 
would see us nor tend us nor feed us as we wan- 
dered our twenty remaining miles to the village of 
Copan. Honduras seemed a true land of the free 
in which the individual is at liberty to go where he 
likes, without guide or path, to sleep in the open, 
starve without hindrance, and lose his way without 
help. For once I was utterly my own master. 
What wonder that I twice missed my way and all 
that day had nothing to eat? As I rode down- 
stream I sank deeper and deeper into the low- 
lands. The trees grew higher, the underbush 
grew thicker, till I could no longer see beyond my 
immediate path. Losing the track I rode aimless 
trails ; but in the end I reached the right ford of 



1^0 The Land Bt-yond Mexico 

the right river, and crossed with the swift water 
up to the saddle, only to find a bhvnk hedge of 
jungle beyond the pebbled shore. Peasant piety 
in European lands is glad to credit the devil with 
all that is unusual in nature: but there is nothing 
truly diabolic in Devil's Bridges and ^Yitches' 
Kitchens. They lack that sinister touch of the 
intellectual, that malicious and painstaking be- 
devilment which is the true caste of Mephisto. 
Not so a re-entrant ford of a flooded stream. 
The trick is apparent — a ricoche from bank to 
island and island to bank will carry one upstream 
or down in zigzag progression. But from where 
I stood I could see a foaming shingle above me 
and another one below, and there was nothing to 
tell me which to choose. The high water had 
washed away all earlier hoof-marks, and it was 
soon apparent that no one but myself had crossed 
the river that day. The jungle screen was placid 
and without expression, ready to crowd me off into 
deep water. 

Since my map told me nothing I chose at 
random and crossed an arm of the stream to 
the island above: and there found track of hoofs. 
Recrossing from the upper end of the shingle to 
the mouth of a tributary stream, here and there 
on a shallow or shelf of sand I found the same 
hoofmarks leading inland, and judged that in dry 



Don Quixote's Ranch 141 

weather the path ran where now the red mud 
swirled. But I met no one until the path emerged 
from the stream and struck through thick bush to 
a little clearing. There I learned that the true 
passage of the ford was downstream; and back I 
rode down the swirl of red water, to do four zig- 
zag river-crossings before I reached the road at 
last. 

It reads quietly and pleasantly; but the little 
drama does not act so well. We of the North, 
for example, never understand why the Sicilian 
Greeks used to engrave a man-headed bull on their 
coins when they wished to represent a river. To 
be sure, a bull roars and plunges and destroys; but 
we do not guess how that grey trickle through a 
bed of stones which so disappointed us in our visit 
to classic lands can do the same. Overnight it 
may change to a red and raging animal that foams 
and bellows. 

At one point Colorada was swept off her feet; 
but though she lost her bodily, she kept her 
mental poise, and came bravely ashore under wet 
saddle and saddle-bags with blowing nostrils and 
a wondering eye. 

Wc had lost our chance of reaching Copan. 
Instead, after half an hour, coming out on a large 
lonely rancho, I turned in and applied for shelter. 
The women-folk received me hospitably and gave 



142 The Land Beyond Mexico 

me black beans and tortillas with the usual ex- 
planation that there was nothing else in the house. 
They themselves, as far as I saw, ate nothing. 

At sunset the ranchero appeared, a gaunt, grim, 
bespectacled old man riding a gaunt grim steed. 
His head was wrapped voluminously in a large 
towel. He rode slowly, like one in a dream, 
without evident aim or interest. Seeing me, he 
greeted me with courtesy, but paid me no further 
attention. Afoot, he moved like a lank ghost: I 
looked to see whether there was flesh beneath 
that turban towel. He entered and I did not see 
him again that evening; but In the early dawn he 
rode off with the same swaying listless motion, his 
head wrapped in the towel, and disappeared slowly 
Into the deep woods. 

The whole farm was Quixotic. The large 
empty house, the aimless Inmates who neither 
tolled nor fed, the absence of any apparent means 
of livelihood gave an eerie Impression of desola- 
tion and self-forgetfulness. There were no 
children In the house; and when I asked the 
women I learned that the old knight-of-the-towel 
was the last of his line. Owning large stretches 
of land which he could not cultivate and cattle 
which he could not tend, he saw himself growing 
old and feeble and the great farm gradually dying 
with the dying of his clan. Neither children nor 



Don Quixote's Ranch I43 

grandchildren sustained him nor took over his 
cares. From habit he looked after his cattle ; but 
his horse had grown old with its rider, and 
neither could have covered more than a few miles 

each day. 

I wondered why he had not bidden farewell and 
decided that he must have forgotten that I was 
in his house ; but when I wished to pay the women, 
I heard that the ranchero had ordered them to ac- 
cept nothing: 'he wished me to feel that I was 
his welcome guest.' And that, amid poverty, was 
Quixotic, too. There was no one to feed Color- 
ada, and the Indian woman sulkily asserted that 
there was no fodder. But I searched around, 
found bran and maize, and gave Colorada plenty; 
then I saddled her without comment and rode 
away. So is hospitality requited when a mule 
must be fed. 

With the shutting in of the trees and the vanish- 
ing of the farm I felt as though I had read, rather 
than encountered, that experience of the old 
ranchero on his broken hors*^, that I had never 
seen him in truth, but had dreamed of Don Quix- 
ote and Rosinante and imagined a Quixotic setting 
for them on the frontierland of Honduras. 

The path led over hot straggHng hills. Once, 
at a cool and shadowy brook, there was a giant 
ceiba-tree with its peculiar sharp-edged roots and 



144 The Land Beyond Mexico 

its great branches. Otherwise there was little to 
note until I came to a sugar-mill, where the cane 
was being pressed between revolving cylinders 
of steel while the sap was smoking and boiling 
in large open vats, tended by Indians armed with 
perforated ladles and scoops. The machinery 
was made in Ohio, U. S. A. 

I was told that the Copan had been unfordable 
for nearly a week and that Colorada would have 
to stay on the hither shore. Riding down to the 
river, I found the forecast true. Great masses 
of reddish brown were foaming and roaring down 
the swollen bed, and though I should have liked to 
take the chances of swimming, I knew that the 
natives were right. Returning to the mill, I left 
Colorada entranced with the faint sweetness of 
the pressed cane and crossed on foot by the 
swinging wire-bridge to the village of Copan. 

There I found the apothecary composing verses 
for a birthday wreath. He was reading them to 
the general grocer for criticism and approval. 
After a few minor changes, both agreed that they 
were very good. I could not identify the metre, 
but liked some of the words, and bought a bottle 
of beer and a pineapple. After that I went to see 
the alcalde, who informed me that the Honduran- 
ian governm.ent imposed a tax on visitors for the 
upkeep of the antiquities, and suggested five dol- 



Dort Quixote's Ranch I45 

lars gold as the correct amount. Fortunately I 
was able to display my wealth In Guatemalan 
paper (which was quite worthless in Honduras) 
and my poverty in current silver. The Hondur- 
anian Government thereupon lowered its impost; 
but to no purpose. Finally the said Government, 
noting my professional capacity and casual inten- 
tions, and discouraged at my insolvency, saw fit to 
remit entirely the revenue for the upkeep of the 
antiquities, and gave me a barelegged escort, for 
which I was tempted to thank the said Govern- 
ment in behalf of the learned and literary profes- 
sions which I represented and the nationality to 
which I belonged. Thereupon I requested the 
escort to look lively, as I was hungry, and 
promised it twenty cents if it fulfilled its office to 
my satisfaction. The escort collected its knife, 
and we started. 

There are numerous accounts of the antiquities 
of Copan, and with these I have no ambition to 
contend. 

The Idols and ruined courts are a memorable 
sight, If only because they stand so desolate and 
overgrown. Though I had come on purpose to 
see them, the setting seemed so unlikely that the 
surprise of the unexpected was not altogether dis- 
solved. One would as soon look for the pyra- 



146 The Land Beyond Mexico 

mids of Sakkhara in the plains of Dakota as for 
these splendid relics of a great civilisation amid the 
unlettered peasantry of the Honduranian woods. 
The tall stones, carved in the overprofusion of 
early decorative art with priest-kings in ritual 
dress, with faces and manikins and involved 
demon limbs, have enough of the proud endurance 
of everlasting things. So that one needs neither 
sentiment nor fantasy to feel the spell of that un- 
kempt hillside with its treasure of more than a 
thousand years. 

It was very hot, and the tangle of undergrowth 
made progress difficult and slow. If one would 
study the ruins, one can learn more from looking 
at the books of Stephens or Maudslay than by 
travelling to Central America. I learned 
nothing, yet I gained an unforgettable memory; 
even as those who go to Athens find that they al- 
ready knew more about the Parthenon than ocu- 
lar inspection will teach them, yet would not trade 
for all the architectural treatises and drawings 
one moment of Attic light on the golden-brown of 
its walls and columns. 

At the time I thought that I must be mad, to 
ride those distances with their hardships and dis- 
comforts only to look around me for a casual hour 
at stones whose reproductions are in our Ameri- 
can museums. But one never knows. Stumbling 



Don Quixote's Ranch 147 

and sweating, I saw little : returned to the village, 
I could even ask myself whether I had noted any- 
thing at all. And yet from all my journey mem- 
ory has since singled out for its most special 
pleasure that idle glimpse at the jungle-smothered 
hillside above the wild and muddy river, with its 
idols, its overgrown walls, and its vanished courts. 

My failure to bring Colorada across the river 
forced me to return to the lonely ranch for 
another night. At dusk Don Quixote rode in, 
spectral as before. He showed no surprise at 
seeing me ; but inquired if I had any English books, 
as he would like to learn the language. He 
seemed disappointed at my negative, though he 
must have known that, in the land where he would 
shortly go to dwell, there is no need for learning 
of other tongues. 

I had brought the women a fine pineapple from 
Copan. It was my only recompense for their 
hospitality, as they again refused my offers of pay- 
ment the next morning. 

* * * sK H: * * 

On the way back to the deceptive ford which 
had cost me such a wetting three days before, a 
couple of brilliant red and green macaws flew 
overhead in the sunlight and there were flocks of 
the little green love-birds which are such common 



148 The Land Beyond Mexico 

(household pets in this part of the land. They 
have a large yellowish saucer around each eye, 
and this, above a heavily bent and juridical beak, 
makes them look like the wisest judge that ever 
sat the bench. In captivity they become extreme- 
ly affectionate, incline toward a hilarious gravity 
(if such a condition may exist), and are an un- 
ending nuisance about the house. Flying wild 
across a clearing, they are a brilliant and happy 
spectacle; for a parrot free is as different from a 
parrot caged as, let us say, a sea-going lobster 
from a salad en mayonniiisc. 

The river was in still higher flood, and there 
was nothing to do but to swim. To my surprise 
Colorada stepped in without remonstrance and off 
we swirled, both of us submerged to the cliin. 
The current carried us down a little, but w^e made 
the other bank easily enough and waded up in the 
swift shallows to the proper exit. Riding in wet 
clothes is neither dangerous nor uncomfortable : 
true depression only sets in when the saddle-bags 
are opened for inspection. Besides, a wet saddle- 
cloth and saddle are not apt to be merciful to an 
animal's back. However, "God himself rescued 
you I" cried a native whom we met; and we had 
the pleasure of learning that we had been the only 
ones to cross the stream during the last two days. 

Poor Colorada 1 The path must have climbed 



Don Quixote's Ranch 149 

nearly three thousand feet, for we toiled up to 
high barren ridges looking wide over familiar and 
unfamiliar valleys. Far below we could see Don 
Quixote's ranch and the valley of the Copan, be- 
fore we turned into other watersheds, wild 
scrawny uplands full of thatched huts and im- 
possible settlements. The descent was even more 
sudden, down and down into the dense vegetation 
once more, to rejoin the Copan where he broke 
through rocky gorges. There, shut in by hot un- 
fertile hills, was a basin with two little towns that 
fronted each other less than a mile apart. 
Twins, they bore twin names, Camotan and 
Jocotan. In either one you wish that you were 
in the other. 

In one of these I found shelter with a kindly 
and garrulous old couple, a veritable Philemon 
and Baucis in Spanish guise. . . . 

"The twain the whole house are, and order and 
obey." 

These made me truly welcome; the old man 
showed me a room, while the old woman in her 
out-of-door kitchen fell to cooking me a 
dinner. . . . 

"Super omnia vultus 

Accessere boni, nee iners pauperque voluntas." 

The old man and I were soon fast friends, and 



150 The Land Beyond Mexico 

I found myself trying to explain why I rode the 
country on mule-back, alone and unarmed; but I 
could convince neither him nor myself, for the 
problem was really too difficult. 

My wet accoutrements were hung up to dry, 
the old man insisting that I should not think of 
departing on the morrow. He promised to help 
me to sell Colorada, and himself led her down to 
the stream at dusk to water and tied her up for 
the night. His ordinary kindnesses shone in that 
land of indifference like the candle and the good 
deed in this naughty world. 

I went to bed and dreamed that I was no longer 
in Guatemala. 

In the morning the dear old nuisance caught me 
at my shaving and was at once lost in rapturous 
admiration of my safety-razor (which he called a 
shaving-machine). Like a child he begged and 
teased me until I gave in. With a round ball of 
soap and a crumpled handful of string he con- 
verted his face to that of a circus-clown. Though 
he got soap into his eyes and both soap and string 
into his mouth, I pronounced the lather a huge 
success. He settled himself in a wooden chair, 
blew out his cheeks, and announced that I could 
begin. Was it my professional ineptitude, or 
the dullness of my razor, or the length of his 
beard, or did I merely imagine those sounds of 



Don Quixote's Ranch 151 

rending and scraping that attended on my art? 
He swore that it was the height of luxury and 
comfort and that the machine was almost worth 
its fabulous price of two hundred dollars (Guate- 
malan) . It was a day in his life, a memory for 

all time. 

Within ten minutes fourteen neighbors had 
heard the details from his lips; and this so in- 
creased his prestige that he came to see that mere 
thanks were an inadequate return for my service. 
His eye travelled in perplexity around his paltry 
shop. I guessed that he was trying to find me a 
present; but I did not speak in time. 

With smiles that almost turned to foolish tears, 
he begged me to be the owner of his pet, his own 
little green love-bird that climbed so prettily about 
the chairs and tables and sat on his wife's shoulder 
while she stirred the bean-pot. 

"But what shall I do with him?" said I. 

"Ride with him on your shoulder," he 
answered. "He will sit there all the way back 
to the States. And always you will think of me." 

For a time I feared that he was right; but in 
the end there was no offence, and the love-bird 
lived on in Jocotan. 

And here, in that same town, comedy turned 
to tragedy; for I sold my Colorada for a handful 
of silver and stood by while another man rode 



152 The Land Beyond Mexico 

her away to an upland farm. With that she goes 
out of my story, a little older and sadder than she 
entered, with close on a thousand miles to the 
credit of her grey legs. I taught her a little 
about river-crossings, while she taught me the 
hundred and one things that only a mountain-mule 
knows. I hope that she found a less energetic 
master than I (a more indulgent one never rode 
the Guatemalan trails). And with that wish, in 
simple decency, I must mark her memory by end- 
ing the chapter. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE LOWLANDS 

CoLORADA was made over by deed and oath to 
her new master, and I was left with the remnants 
of equipage and the prospect of thirty miles on 
foot. I was content to wait for night and the 
moon before starting; but while I talked to the 
small boys of the village and kicked my heels in 
front of my lodgings, the good lady of the house, 
having eaten a green orange and some rancid 
butter without due interval or reflection, was sud- 
denly convulsed with colic. The miserable 
creature died hourly through all that afternoon 
and evening and made a losing hazard out of my 
attempts at sleep. At midnight my equally wake- 
ful host, seeing me prepared to go, brewed me 
coffee while he reviled his consort for her per- 
verse failure to recover. He accompanied me a 
step upon my way, past the moonlit square and 
the sleeping soldiers, whom he seemed anxious to 
avoid. At the edge of the village he begged me 
to wait for daylight. 

153 



154 The Land Beyond Mexico 

"Stay and sleep," said he. "There are evil 
folk on the roads at night." 

"But I am more evil still," said I; and on the 
instant felt like a hare in full armour which I once 
had seen in a Japanese picture. 

The timid old man was somewhat re-assured 
and sent me off with his blessing. My last wish 
was for his wife's recovery. "Oh," said he, "she 
will not die : she never does." And with that we 
parted. 

By dawn I was high up in the hills, above a 
gorge through which my muddy enemy, the 
Copan, foamed and roared. It seemed not unlike 
the South of France with its limestone clefts and 
chasms and restless rivers. But better light de- 
stroyed the resemblance. I saw towers and roofs 
in the distance, my only glimpse of that Chiqui- 
mula where the Spaniards had once built a great 
church. It is now a great ruin and may well be 
worth a visit. But my path turned away on a 
long descent to the burning plain of Zacapa; and 
there I walked in the sun for a couple of hours 
between great twisted growth of cactus and 
prickly-pear which almost alone grow in that 
curiously arid stretch. In the midst of an other- 
wise prodigal fertility the river-valley of Zacapa 
is bad-land. The giant cactus, erect and fantastic- 
armed, grows to a thirty-foot tree (if such a 



The Lowlands I55 

malevolent and leafless demon may be allowed 
that shadowy and comfortable name). The 
opuntia spreads out Its thorny elephant-ears, from 
which (like a travesty of Athena's birth) spring 
new ears fully armed. There is no body, — only 
a chain of ears with a waxy yellow flower which 
runs a gamut of sunset colours as it goes to fruit. 
Between them, Cereus and Opuntia cover the bare 
soil with long fleshy fingers pulled out heavenward 
and lop-eared monsters of unpleasant green. But 
between the ranks of this mediaeval purgatory ran 
the railway, and in the heart of the heat was the 
town of Zacapa with its American hotel. A 
civihsation of iced drinks and screened doors and 
spring-beds closed in about me, and I was at rest. 

H: ***** * 

The river was an old friend. It was the 
Motagua, which weeks earlier I had seen as a 
litde stream trickhng through the barrancas of 
Quiche. It had come down through a hundred 
and twenty miles of hill-country and was now the 
great river of Guatemala in an alluvial plain ten 
miles wide. Below Zacapa it leaves this arid ex- 
panse in rapids that break through rocky bar- 
riers and descend to a level valley-floor. Here 
on one side are the border-mountains of Hon- 
duras, on the other is the long spur of the range 
where the ancient races dug their silver and gold. 



156 The Land Beyond Mexico 

All between is damp lowland, heavily flooded in 
the time of greatest rain where vast tangles of 
sun-obscuring forest-growth are rapidly being con- 
verted into a sea of banana-trees. 

At Quirigua Station there is now no jungle to 
be seen. Instead, a smooth sloping lawn, a hos- 
pital, a hotel, and endless banana plantations 
show what the self-interested benevolence of an 
American fruit company has done to open and 
improve the country. Improvement, however, 
has an economic rather than scenic application; 
for a banana farm is a dull affair. The palm- 
like leaves are always torn to ribbons and these 
have a pleasant motion in the breeze; but there is 
no real beauty of shadow or foliage, and the feel- 
ing of heat is indissociable from the vast damp 
stretches of evenly planted stems. To clear the 
jungle and set bananas is Hke ploughing ruined 
gardens to raise wheat. The railway-traveller 
may judge of this. Some ten miles below Quir- 
igua there is a fine stretch of jungle which the 
banana interests have not yet managed to buy. 
There the vast palms and fern-trees still stretch 
up their leaves, the ceibas rise to their hundred- 
and-fifty foot greatness, bearded with Spanish 
moss. There is hanging bread-fruit; and one 
may see that strange tree, the matapalo, whose 
base is a wigwam of edged roots ending below In 



The Lowlands 157 

webbed feet and merging above to the giant trunk. 
When young, this tree grows around some other 
for support, and in the end strangles it to death. 
The great branches are loaded with tree-orchids 
in full flower or cabled with "monkey-swings," 
fifty-foot vine-stalks that descend like stays to the 
damp soil (from which they draw moisture in 
such quantities that, if they are cut, they gush 
with clear and abundant water). Yet it is not 
only the strangeness and variety of the detail 
which impresses. There is always in the tropical 
forest a sense of something invisible just beyond, 
a daylight compacted of shadow, a dark silence 
which works on the senses as though it were por- 
tentous of something unimaginable about to be en- 
countered. And all this has vanished from Quir- 
igua, and the monotony of the plantation has 
taken its place. Monotony there is indeed. The 
straight tracks of the little railways lead on in- 
terminably, since every spot is precisely like every 
other. It is a realization of Alice's looking-glass 
adventure. Walk or run as you will, you are still 
in the selfsame place. In the heat of noon the 
feeling of oppressive monotony is intensified. 
From the hotel verandah the drowsy eye looks 
across the river-plain to the thunder-clouds that 
are balled on the high blue ridges of Honduras. 
Elsewhere the sky is clear, an intense blue through 



158 The Land Beyond Mexico 

which the sunlight descends and in which the buz- 
zards soar and circle, hour after hour, without 
beat of wing. There is no wind, no noise, only 
all-penetrating noonday heat. The foreground 
is a crude light-green of banana-plants. Two 
miles distant, rises the dark green of a single 
grove. This alone the fruit company has spared, 
for here are hidden the most famous Indian ruins 
in the land. 

They have been so well pictured and described,^ 
their replicas are to be found in so many northern 
museums, that there is here no reason for detailed 
account or illustration. But I may still be per- 
mitted a few impressions and opinions of these, 
the most interesting ruins that I saw. 

The site has been thoroughly cleared of trees 
and undergrowth, which has increased its accessi- 
bility and visibility, but rather impaired its 
picturesqueness. No doubt it is captious to com- 
plain. The grove has all sprung up since the 
temples were built and the obelisks erected; in 
fact it is the prying strength of vegetation that 
has been the main instrument of destruction. Not 
the hands of succeeding savage races, but the 

^ See, for example : J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in 
Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. 1840. Vol. II. 

A. C. & A. P. Maudslay, A Glimpse at Guatemala. 1899. 
(Sumptuously illustrated.) pp. 146-151. 

Art & Archxology, 1916. pp. 269-290. 



The Lowlands 159 

roots and branches of the jungle have forced the 
stones from their places and overthrown the 
heavy walls. Once there was a village round 
about. But houses with walls of split bamboo 
and roofs of palm-leaf thatch are the least en- 
during of human habitations. Within a year 
after their destruction the jungle must have come 
in. For all ithat, the jungle now belongs to 
Quirigua as the Turkish minarets belong to Saint 
Sophia, and I am as sorry that the ruins stand 
in clearings as I am glad that around those clear- 
ings the great trees are still allowed to stand. 

From the endless world of bananas the visitor 
enters the sacred grove and comes to a clearing 
with five obelisks. They are of uneven height, 
but all alike are carved with strangely complicated 
figures of priests or kings, standing erect, and all 
have, on their shorter sides, square panels of 
picture-writing. 

A quarter of a mile further on are the ruins of 
a considerable group of buildings, part excavated, 
part mere mounds of tropic vegetation. Here In 
1 9 1 2 an American expedition brought to light and 
partially restored an ancient temple, whose seven 
chambers lie deep in massive walls. Nearby in 
a plaza are idols, among them the Great Turtle. 

The obelisks of the priest-kings are monoliths 
of reddish brown sandstone tinged with faint 



i6o The Land Beyond Mexico 

purple. The stone was seemingly quarried In the 
foothills beyond the floor of the river-valley and 
floated to its destination when the Motagua was 
in flood. The largest are 25 and 26 feet in 
height. The kings in consequence are greatly 
more than life-size, though their great stature is 
much reduced by the high plaque of ornament on 
which they stand and by the towering head-dress 
whose many stages wander off into vagaries of 
grinning heads, monsters, and branching feather- 
work. 

The [typical king has rather rude features, 
large almond-shaped eyes, a rather triangular and 
fleshy nose, lips widely parted to make an almond- 
shaped mouth, a pointed beard springing from the 
underside of the chin. The so-called Egyptian 
cast of this countenance is merely due to the in- 
evitable conventions of an unemancipated art. 
The squatting priestess with the marvellously 
elaborate headdress, who is carved on the "Great 
Turtle," may as well be compared to a Korean 
idol. The elements of such a comparison are all 
of them merely the universal primitive conven- 
tions. Korean and Mayan art both fall victim 
to the instinct for frontal presentation and seek 
refuge from empty surfaces by geometric fillings. 

On all the carvings at Quirigua there is a tu- 
mult of accessory design. Thus, the great turtle, 



The Lowlands i6l 

a solid stone of some twenty tons, has every inch 
of surface wrought with ornaments which irrele- 
vantly include human profiles and run to harsh- 
angled scrolls without apparent import. Much 
patience shows that these scrolls are geometric 
conventionalisations of human or animal motives. 
Tree and flower designs seem to be absent. The 
trick of the art, then, is to make a geometric 
mosaic of carving from these discontinuous forms 
and to link them together by some pretence of a 
general scheme. Consequently, the dominant 
figure of priest or dragon ramifies into irrelevan- 
cies. Each subordinate part becomes a field for 
smaller independent designs, as when the royal 
boots become human masks in profile, or the nose 
of the great toad becomes a human head. And 
so the general plan wanders off into borrowings 
from demon and bird and snake, until every inch 
of surface is filled with these interlocking 
elements, and art has become a puzzle-picture. 

There are, therefore, two striking '(and I 
should say, disastrous) elements in this art: first, 
the trick of turning nature into a repertoire of 
angular conventionalisations of human, avian, 
and reptilian motives; secondly, the mania for 
making each organic part of a large design serve 
as a new field for wholly unrelated smaller de- 
signs, whose elements in turn are similarly at- 



1 62 The Land Beyond Mexico 

tacked and disintegrated, (The old art of the 
Scythian steppes of Russia shows this same ten- 
dency; the art of Greece would have none of it.) 

It is perfectly just, therefore, to maintain that 
Mayan art gives us just the opposite of those 
qualities of formal synthesis and unity, of emo- 
tional expression in natural objects through sig- 
nificant line and mass, which are the elements of 
greatness in Greek and the best of modern Euro- 
pean art. 

Mayan sculpture, from this point of view, is at 
its weakest in large complicated subjects and at its 
best in isolated decorative elements, especially in 
those where the angular treatment is in place and 
expressive, — I mean, in the grotesque. Such is 
the manikin-rattle or sceptre in the hand of the 
priestess in the dragon's mouth; and such par ex- 
cellence are the manikins of the larger panels of 
picture-writing on one of the obelisks. Here 
there is a truly amusing inventiveness in the tor- 
mented positions of the little human-limbed 
demon with his acrobatic agility so deftly rec- 
tangularised. Because there is the same naive 
humor of interwoven line and delight in the 
affrightening, there is a certain resemblance to 
Chinese dragon-designs; but the comparison goes 
no further, because there is no counterpart to the 



The Lowlands 163 

serious and unfantastic qualities of Chinese 
drawing. 

These little panels (perhaps because they show 
the local art at its best) bring out two further 
characteristics of Mayan carving, which again 
seem artistically mistaken. These are, the sub- 
stitution of an artificial complexity of line for the 
simple and flowing contours of natural forms, 
and the failure to distinguish the merely grotesque 
from the imaginatively significant. 

Accordingly, I cannot rate Mayan art very 
high. But It has a great and absorbing interest 
which Is largely Independent of Its sesthetic value. 
After all, it is what It Is, — a strange and marvel- 
lous relic of a unique civilisation. I am confident 
that Quirigua will become a great place of pil- 
grimage. Seen in their setting the bizarre dis- 
tortions of its art are only the more stimulating to 
the imagination which begins to play about altar 
and image and shrine in the jungle, carved and 
built and abandoned more than thirteen centuries 
ago. 

Of the Quirigua architecture there is not suffi- 
cient to allow an estimate of its attainments. It 
is not mechanically interesting, as it seems to use 
neither columns nor arches, but depends on solid 
wall-faces. In the Quirigua temple there were 
seemingly two stages, the lower one plain with a 



164 The Land Beyond Mexico 

cornice-band of pictoglyphs, the upper a fagade 
of patterned stones. This lower portion stands 
to-day, its wall-blocks relaid in cement and 
sheltered from the rain. The long box-hke plan 
is clear and the pictoglyphic adornment of the 
threshhold steps is preserved in place. In the 
hotel at Quirigua Station is a row of idol-heads, 
sombre or grotesque, which once ornamented the 
wall-spaces and glowered above the doorways. 
The picture-writing of the cornice records a date 
which has been synchronised with 540 A. D. 

These pictoglyphs have a quaint geometry 
which is all their own. Of the 200 varieties, 
nearly a quarter are understood by the specialists, 
though all of these (unfortunately) are connected 
with phases of the Mayan calendar. The chro- 
nology is thus assured to us, and we read their 
records like one who should read our northern 
chronicles with a knowledge confined to numerals. 
I fear that the accomplishment is almost equiva- 
lent to ignorance, as far as the more human ele- 
ments of history are concerned. However, this 
much is held to be established: that the royal 
obelisks range between 490 and 535 A. D. (they 
are supposed to show a steady degeneration in 
artistic power) ; that the temples were built and 
deserted in the sixth century when the Mayas fled 
northward into Yucatan, where their civilisation 



The Lowlands 165 

continued until the fifteenth century; but that 
their ancient sites were never revisited by them. 
Quirigua therefore has been lost in the jungle for 
more than a millennium. Yet "with the further 
excavation of the site and the complete decipher- 
ment of the writing, it may be that even so great 
a lapse of time has not sufficed to blot out the 
ancient temple-town from the understanding of 
mankind. 

Below Quirigua the railway continues to follow 
the Motagua toward the sea. Banana planta- 
tions alternate with short stretches of unclaimed 
thicket. In place of Indian villages of bamboo 
and thatch appear the settlements of the negroes 
who are employed on the plantations. They live 
in whitewashed wooden shanties, speak a highly 
comic variant of English, and hail from distant 
parts. Some have been imported from our own 
southern states. Many have come from Jamaica 
in the West Indies, and most of these would like 
to get back to that island where, as one informed 
me, there is for them "very glorious second-class 
living." But few of them have energy or ready 
money enough to reahze this fitful dream of re- 
turn. The lowland chmate has taken the energy 
and the Chinese who keep the general stores have 
taken the ready money. So they work on, play 



1 66 The Land Beyond Mexico 

music, live in their shanties, and look after their 
wives. In a world of idleness how should they 
worry themselves for anything beyond? 

The railway leaves the Motagua Valley and 
passes through almost sunless thickets to the head 
of the Gulf of Honduras. Here is Port Barrios, 
where I pray Heaven that only my enemies may 
ever have to live. Yet there are three large 
wooden hotels, food in plenty, and refuge against 
the mosquitoes, so that it would not be hard to 
imagine worse places. This is the terminus of the 
railway from Guatemala City, and here the pas- 
senger steamers arrive weekly from New Orleans 
and fortnightly from New York. There are a 
dock, a railway yard, and considerable inter- 
mittent activity; for here is the gateway of Guate- 
mala. 

The weird double line of negro huts blazed up 
in the middle of the night while I was in Barrios 
and a midnight spectacle of Inferno brought on 
a charred dawn with half of the village destroyed. 
But thatched huts are like tropical vegetation and 
grow up again in a couple of days. The negroes 
wore new hats and shoes, mysteriously acquired 
during the excitement, and there was a noticeable 
industry among the Singer sewing machines which 
infest every native community, as unexpected 
gowns were shaped from strangely plentiful cloth; 



The Lowlands 167 

but all this subsided, and Barrios resumed its 
internautic dullness. 

A few miles oceanward along the bay lies 
Livingston. Once it was the main Atlantic port, 
before the railway diverted every cargo. It is 
still the capital of its department, vested with 
official, though no longer commercial, importance. 
Here the governor lives, the court legislates, and 
the band plays. Of governor and judiciary I 
have nothing to record; but of Livingston as a 
musical centre I am better informed. 

It was Sunday, a poor day for all pursuits and 
pastimes wherein precision of brain and hand 
are consequent. The negro who carried my pack 
from the landing was on the amusing side of that 
ragged line between week-day sobriety and 
Dominical hilarity. It was he who informed me 
that he played bass in the village band and that 
there was to be a concert that afternoon. I am 
a lover of music, yet I fear that I furthered her 
corruption, since by rewarding a porter I 
inebriated a musician. When I reached the vil- 
lage square an hour later, the band had taken 
their places, though their music-notes, seen 
through an alcoholic haze, swayed and quadrilled 
before their eyes and refused to settle quietly on 
the racks. But their leader, though a small man, 
was of greater capacity than they (I speak as 



1 68 The Land Beyond Mexico 

well of music as of brandy), oblivious to every 
thought but that of leadership. For him, the 
politely attentive and unsmiling audience was for- 
gotten; he saw neither square nor village, but only 
his men. His face was set, and he gripped his 
wand frenetically. The men must play their 
notes. 

For all of that, they did not. They played 
their neighbours', they invented, borrowed, and 
discovered notes such as I have never heard, till 
their faces swelled with the windy effort. The 
little leader stopped them time and again, to 
remonstrate, to argue, to exhort, and finally to 
begin afresh. The audience waited and listened, 
polite, unsmiling, unsurprised. At last, a more 
than usually outrageous impasse precipitated a 
long tirade against the wielder of the clarinet, 
who in turn became voluble, excited, and at last 
mutinous. He refused to go on, rose, and tried 
to leave. At the steps, the little leader pounced 
upon him from behind, seized his coat-collar, and 
manfully dragged him back. 

"Jesus," said he, "sit down!" 

Jesus sat. 

"Take that pipe!" 

Jesus sullenly raised the instrument. 

"Now blow those notes, and blow them right!" 
said the leader; and the concert began again. I 



The Lowlands 169 

watched Jesus. The stops moved nimbly under 

his fingers, but I could have sworn that no sound 

issued forth. The leader watched him, too, with 

occasional side-long glances of furious suspicion. 

Each time Jesus redoubled his pantomimic zeal. 

Meanwhile the drummer-boy fell asleep in the 

midst of the uproar, and the selection had to be 

stopped until he could be revivified. The native 

audience was attentive, but unamused. For 

them it was only what it purported to be, the 

regular Sunday concert. 
******* 

At Livingston the Rio Dulce breaks through 
the shore headlands, to form the most beautiful 
river in Central America. A thirty-foot oil- 
burning flat-bottomed boat runs up-stream once a 
week, starting an hour before the dawn and finish- 
ing its run of more than a hundred miles at sunset. 
In those fourteen hours it makes one of the most 
interesting and beautiful of river journeys. At 
four in the morning we left the landing-stage. 
It was brilliant starlight. The dog-star burned 
above a waning moon, and both re-appeared re- 
flected on the calm ocean with a brilliance that 
we of the North never see. For the dog-star 
can cast a shadow in those latitudes and the full 
moon floods the open country with a silver day- 
light. We ran inland, and soon the banks rose 



170 The Land Beyond Mexico 

up to shut out half of the fading starlight with 
straight walls of two and three hundred feet. 
By daylight, these walls are solid greenery, tree 
above tree, with that dense richness of shadow 
under sunlight which gives tropical forests their 
effect of richness allied to that of mid-Gothic 
tracery or heavy lace. But as I saw it first, it 
was all shadowy walls and starlit water, rare 
and mysterious, a blend of elfland with explora- 
tions of the tributaries of the Amazon. With a 
red sunrise streaming behind us we came out into 
a lake full of grassy islands and low-lying points 
and shores, which after an hour narrowed to a 
slow-running stream where occasional alligators 
submerged themselves at our approach. Some 
twenty-five miles from Livingston an old crumbled 
Spanish fort stood guard over a final bend of the 
river. Rounding the point, we came suddenly 
into a great inland lake whose further shores were 
mountains lost in haze, between whose lines the 
water ran sheer to the horizon like a glimpse of 
the open sea. 

It was the Lake of Izabal, or Golfo Dulce, 
thirty miles long and twelve miles wide, with a lee 
shore so rough under the afternoon wind that the 
native boats dare not cross. Around it are the hills, 
rising inland to ridges 5000 feet high. Yet the 



The Lowlands ^ 171 

effect is more akin to Neuchatel than Geneva, 
for there are no peaks nor cliffs, but only low 
wooded shores; and the great hills conceal their 
height. The lake was windless in the bright sun, 
its surface so thickl}^ pollen-streaked that it re- 
sembled the rich gold veining of some blue trans- 
lucent stone which changed and complicated its 
marking as the swell of the boat disturbed it. 
Otherwise there was nothing to see, until a dozen 
silver-sided fish started leaping free, and once the 
brown back of an animal broke the water. This 
I took to be a sea-cow. There are also said to be 
tapirs in considerable number; but of these I saw 
none, perhaps because of their enviable ac- 
complishment of crossing a lake by walking on 
the bottom, perhaps because there were none to 
see. Across the lake a couple of houses showed 
where the village of Izabal stood. In Spanish 
times and even until the railroad was built, this 
was the main Atlantic port of the country. The 
sailing boats were warped up the long windings 
of the river to the lake and so came to their in- 
land destination, which was rich enough in ships 
and cargo to tempt the pirate ships to their de- 
struction beneath the guns of San Felipe, the 
Spanish fort whose ruins I had seen. It is all 
desolate country now and almost uninhabited. 



172 The Land Beyond Mexico 

But It was here that Cortes passed in 1525 on 
that marvellous journey to Honduras when he 
built bridges through miles of jungle-swamp, with 
his horses floundering to their very ears. 

He tells his adventures simply and well in his 
fifth letter to the Emperor Charles V. He seems 
to have treated the natives kindly, though he 
speaks indifferently of burning an Indian for a 
moral offence. The simple folk mistook his com- 
pass for a magic mirror and hesitated to conspire 
against him. At Peten he was obliged to leave 
behind him a horse with a bad splinter in its foot. 
He recommended the animal so strongly to his 
native host that the simple Indian, in careful 
veneration of so marvellous an animal, offered it 
the choicest birds and flowers for food. The 
poor beast was thankless and died. Later Span- 
iards found a carven image of it among the local 
gods; but this was subsequently lost overboard 
while it was being transported. To this day the 
natives tell of Cortes and claim that on still days 
they catch a glimpse of this statue at the bottom 
of the lake. 

Around the Lago Dulce in Guatemala Cortes 
was unfortunate enough to meet with armed op- 
position and had in consequence a sorry time in 
his attempts to wrest food from the scattered In- 



The Lowlands 173 

dians of the almost pathless jungle. The modern 

traveller has still a little of the same struggle, just 

enough to let him admire the hardiness of that 

great man. 
******* 

When our little steamer reached the head of 
the lake, it entered a muddy estuary between 
banks of willows and marsh-grass. The stream 
was narrow, but proved to be only one of many 
mouths; for the delta of the Polochic is as many- 
branched as Solomon's famous candlestick. 
After the partings of the stream were passed, the 
river proved to be of great size, winding swiftly 
through endless twists and turns. The journey 
is both fascinating and monotonous. At times 
the jungle-trees hang over the muddy water; In 
other parts the banks are sandy flats lined with 
tall plumed grasses and palms. But everywhere 
the waterfront has a wonderful variety of lights 
and shadows, of great trees and leafy under- 
growth, through which the eye cannot peer. Be- 
hind its screen in the great green thicket the par- 
rots screech and chatter and an occasional black 
baboon barks. Now and then a pair of long- 
tailed macaws fly up and across the stream. If 
the sun falls right, their dark silhouettes suddenly 
turn to a brilliant burst of vermilion and green, 



174 The Land Beyond Mexico 

gorgeous and unforgettable. Like Wordsworth's 
daffodils, long afterward they flash upon that in- 
ward eye "which is the bliss of solitude" : 

"I gazed — and gazed — but little thought 
What wealth the show to me had brought." 

It was to such scenes and down this very river 
that Cortes floated on his rude rafts four hundred 
years agoi. At a iswift hairpin bend he was 
swirled into the bank, to be showered with arrows 
by the ambushed Indians who well knew this trick 
of the wild current. Now, Captain Evans, god- 
father of the Polochic, used to run a Mississippi 
paddle-wheel on this river, and one time he ran 
it hard aground on one of these turns. "Evans' 
Bend" said he laughingly, as we passed the spot. 
But I wager that Cortes had named and cursed it 
before him. 

In the dry season the river runs between sand 
bars and muddy flats that make navigation difli- 
cult and supply sun-parlours for the unnumbered 
populace of alligators. But during the time of 
rains the muddy water stretches unbroken from 
bank to bank and the alligators sleep in the 
grasses or lie at the bottom of the stream. 

As the boat passes, kingfishers fly scoldingly 
from snag to snag, alligators put their heads 
under water, the turtles scuttle to the bottom, the 



The Lowlands 175 

herons and bitterns start up. At one point we 
roused a flock of those white herons whose exist- 
ence the aigrette hunters once so endangered. 
Instead of rising above the trees and eluding us, 
they flew before us mile after mile along the 
stream, always vanishing around a bend of the 
river, to be startled from their perch as we 
rounded in pursuit, i^t another place a large 
turtle regarded us with an air of profound 
astonishment, while two butterflies settled them- 
selves peaceably upon his Semitic countenance. 
Such are the sights of this journey; and of these 
there is prodigal profusion. Yet gradually a 
sense of monotony settles down, and by sunset 
one is well persuaded never to journey up the 
Amazon. A thousand miles of tropical river 
must be the highroad to desperation or insanity. 

As the stream winds through the flat-lying 
plain between the screens of jungle-growth, there 
are glimpses of the high mountain-ranges which 
frame the river-valley. Their forests stretch to 
the very crests where the cloud-banks begin, with 
their shining white and tumbled masses towering 
up into the blue and sunny sky. Straight over- 
head it is clear, and the sun glitters more and 
more on the muddy stream as the afternoon 
passes. At last the larger trees begin to throw 
their shadows on the water, till finally the sun 



176 The Land Beyond Mexico 

sinks behind them and the cool of evening comes 
suddenly over everything. 

At the day's decline we rounded a bend and 
found a dock and a railroad shed, for assurance 
that nearby there was a village in which to pass 
the night. 

Panzos is In the department of Alta Verapaz. 
This is a fact of administrative topography. Yet 
it is easily recognizable without recourse to the 
map. For the village Is clean and tidy and there 
is a general air of self-respect which distinguishes 
the natives of this region. The women are often 
handsome and well-formed; the men are less like 
cattle and more like free beings. It would need 
an ethnologist to decide whether these differ- 
ences are due to the German and Spanish infusion 
or whether the original Indians were really a dif- 
ferent stock; but that is a quarrel about causes, 
and, In any case, the present result is plain. 

Verapaz Is undeservedly one of the less known 
regions of the country. Nowhere else are the 
customs of the Indians so varied, their temper so 
kindly, their villages so profuse. They are 
among the few natives whose artistic industries 
are of real interest. Their painted and carved 
bowls have the New-World character of the 
vanished art of the old Central American races. 



The Lowlands ^ 177 

Without being alike, they are almost inexplicably 
reminiscent. It is like a haunting flavour that 
the tongue never fully tastes, this common quality 
which makes their art American. 

Panzos, however, is still in the damp lowlands, 
mosquito-infested, malaria-doomed. There is 
clear running water in the httle plaza, with its 
garrison-room for the handful of native soldiers 
and its church where the sacristan's piety runs to 
discordant jangling of bells and explosion of 
powder in old iron pipes (to the detriment of 
nerves and slumber) . But the daily holiday and 
the ceaseless fountain are only a mask of gayety 
and health. The Indians, brought down from 
the uplands, die of fever. Of the population of 
thirty years ago only one remains to-day. To be 
sure, the natives have children aplenty; but in the 
end only the race of mosquitoes really prospers in 
Panzos. 

This is the end of river navigation and from 
here a little railway runs for twenty-eight miles 
up to the region of firm soil and dry roads where 
the ox-carts can bring down the coffee from the 
upland plantations. For this is a great coffee 
district, and the Alta Verapaz crop is held to be 
of the finest in the world. The plants grow into 
veritable trees (though their yield is not so 
abundant as that of the bushes of the Pacific 



lyS The Land Beyond Mexico 

slope). Owing to the great rainfall, the planta- 
tions are always on hill-sides, so that the water 
may drain from the sloping soil. With all this 
humidity, the growth is prodigious. But weeds 
are more fertile than coffee, and constant hoeing 
is essential. This loosens the soil, which the 
heavy rains wash away. Perhaps because of this 
constant loss of humus, the plantations are not 
long-lived and re -planting is necessary before 
twenty years are up. Coffee, which many of us 
imagine to* be indigenous and immemorial, or at 
least to date from Spanish times, has been grow- 
ing in the land for only fifty years. It would be 
interesting to know whether it will last many cen- 
turies or whether the soil will deteriorate until 
Coban coffee loses its golden reputation. Amid 
so much rainfall and washing-away of the soil, 
neither the olive nor vine could flourish; and so 
it was that, until coffee was introduced, there was 
little but the scattered corn-patches of the Indians 
where now the great plantations cover the hill- 
sides. The foreign coffee-planters have grown 
rich, while the native is just where he was. 

The little railway, leaving Panzos, runs inland 
through the jungle, the journey for the most part 
being a dull passage through disorderly under- 
growth. There are occasional great trees, some 
hung with the baskets of the yellow-tails, whose 



The Lowlands 179 

colony is reminiscent of a Christmas tree loaded 
with sugar-plums. The damp heat is intense and 
the air vicious with mosquito-swarms. But after 
twenty-five miles the ground becomes firmer, the 
rocky hills close in, and the train climbs through 
a fine canyon with overhanging walls, white water- 
falls, and marvellous trees. The Polochic is now 
a mere stream running in the foam of rapids. 
Beyond the canyon the country is clearly upland 
in character: the jungle has vanished as if by 
magic, locked out by the walls of the defile through 
which the train has come. Here the railway 
ends, near the village of Pancajche. Beyond are 
the wooded hills through which the road ascends 
to the coffee-lands and the town of Coban in its 
upland basin. At the time of my visit the ox- 
carts had been almost a month on a road which 
is barely seventy miles in length, but unimaginable 
in its mud. It may have been here that the classic 
traveller was found sunken to his shoulders in 
mire, who, on being extricated with difficulty, 
thankfully advised his rescuers that if they were 
interested in a fine mule they would find one eight 
feet deeper. 

From Coban one can ride northward in steep 
descent to the huge unpeopled lowland province 
of Peten. But of this vast lowland department 
I can tell you nothing. Impassable in the rainy 



i8o The Land Beyond Mexico 

season, sparsely settled with Indian hamlets in 
the midst of swamp and jungle, it is full of the 
remnants of the ancient Mayas. It is to this 
region that present-day archaeological explora- 
tion is directed; and perhaps those who have more 
knowledge and a better will can tell you something 
of this wild and unpleasant land. 

From Cohan it is only a four-days' ride south- 
ward to Guatemala City, at first through beauti- 
ful mountain country. From a ridge there is a 
view into a great upland cup, in whose centre shine 
the red roofs of Salama. Its enclosing hills are 
the celebrated "terraced mountains," which 
ascend in even and well-defined earth-steps, as 
though ancient races had put them under culti- 
vation. Yet the phenomenon is undoubtedly 
natural, and no hands have ever been at work 
except those of the wind and the rain. There 
is here no parallel for the Incas' laborious and 
marvellous husbandry. 

From the basin of Salama the rock-road makes 
a long descent to the crossing of the Motagua; 
and from this point begin familiar scenes. Here 
the highlands commence once more. It is the old 
story: the saddle at daybreak, a long day's trail, 
tortillas and black beans, Indians with their packs, 
upland views and wooded gorges, and at sunset 
the far-stretched plain of the capital city with the 



The Lowlands i8i 

great volcanoes black against the flame-red sky. 
After more than a thousand miles of trail, I 
end where I began. I have done what I could 
to recount the sights and follies of that curious 
circle; and I finish without regret. But for you 
who' have journeyed through this book I feel a 
touch of something that may be envy. For (I 
warn you well!) you, and not I, have discovered 
the truly enjoyable way of travelling Guatemala. 
But if in spite of that, on laying down this book, 
you think not over-kindly of one who has lured 
you so long and so far through such an uncivilised 
land, let your last thought be not of me, but of 
her who journeyed diligently and without com- 
plaint, Colorada, my grey she-mule of the 
mountains. 



